Fremont Peak Aug 3

Hans Schulze

FPOA had a shindig on the hill, with over 150 people participating in a number of events starting around 5PM. A decent BBQ, a huge raffle with 2 telescopes and at least 100 objects given out by Sam of Telescope City, a presentation about near-earth objects / meteor showers. All in all, quite entertaining.

After the wind-down, I set up my 12" Meade on Ranger Row. DDK was set up on the south side, and about 7 scopes set up on the pads, from 4" to 12". Some imaging going on, one gent I just met was working on the Ring, while I had problems with my new Orion guider not being able to tell my scope which way to move while trying to snag a decent amount of time on M51. I tried the ST4 cable setup that came with the unit, it still doesn't work since Adin's GSSP. At that time I switched to USB/Serial, and I was able to take some nice guided images. Not last night. It wouldn't budge. I will build a debug setup for this, as it is very frustrating to spend hours driving and setting up/tearing down for a couple of hours of photons, all due to a cable or connector fault.

So I went widefield (40D on top of LX200), and gathered five swaths of Milky Way with the intention of stitching it together, or at least to try, as I was aiming by hand. I also tried running the camera in the higher ISO's, 30 sec at 1600 ISO, and the images were about midscale on the histogram.

So overall, the sky was pretty clear, no clouds, not as clear as the better nights at Adin, a very very slight haze, and of course some small amount of light from Gilroy, Hollister, and Watsonville.

I'll send an update if anything came of the swath.