Well it's been a long journey but fiiiiinally, last night, the first photons were gathered from Australias Highest Observatory!
I have imagined last night for a veeery long time and it was everything I had imagined and more
Walking around the elevated observatory deck, with a wee dram in hand, a couple of almost comforting twinkling lights visible on the horizon, from Cooma 55km away, an open mountain top field all around me, flooded with dulcet ground illumination, from a first quarter Moon, with a super clear sky above, hardly a breath of wind and only the sound of camera cooling fans, emanating from the majestic white 3M Scopedome, to break the silence...it was just magic! Needless to say I had a smile on my face...sigh...I have finally done it! Maama Mia!
With the first quarter Moon in the sky, t'was not perfectly dark of course but the Milky Way still looked better than from most Canberra locations, on a Moonless night, so I'll take it
It was mostly a night of testing everything, getting the mount pointing making sure both imaging rigs are operational, focusing the guide cameras and getting back into the operational grove. After doing a goto to Achernar and then spending some time finding the damn thing on the damn chip!...I got there in the end and synced on it, then after having polar aligned with the Polar scope, some weeks ago, the telescope is pointing well enough to land all Gotos's on the chip and most in the central 1/3, it was great zooming around the sky seeing each object land in the frame, happy days
After a long hiatus, it was also satisfying to see the AP1600GTO doing its thing again, in the tracking and guiding department, delivering perfect raw autoguiding with average errors of just +/- 0.2 arc sec!
The first set of frames coming down showed we had excellent seeing and this continued all night, so that made me very happy, I always hoped (prayed) my first imaging session would see a repeat of the excellent visual observing conditions I had experienced so far up at Eagleview
and I wasn't disappointed
First Light is not a full blown colourimage, in fact, it is only a 2 X 1min snap, with no darks, no flats and very basic minimal processing, basically just a log stretch and curves to reveal the dynamic range and that's it
....the potential is pretty obvious and I'm excited to get into my first proper imaging project
I have attached a crop to this post but you can see the full size, full res version (remember, its a mere 2X1min exposure under a first quarter Moon)
HERE
Happy Days, onward and upward from here as they say...
Mike