What a corker!!!

[LewisM]

ABout time we finally started getting some autumnal nights up here in QLD. Tonight is breath-taking, and not even a bee's fart of wind!!!

It is a wee chilly... the camera, which was running at between 3° and -0.9° on Thursday night, is now sitting happily at -3.4°C , and it's only 23:33 - give it till 3am :)

Let's hope this is really the start of the incredible autumn/winter nights we have in QLD.

[DJT]

Green with envy , mate..cloudy here..enjoy!

[LewisM]

Back in for the night... 0224... piked out, as my guidescope wasn't getting a guide star near what I wated to image, so swapped back to the old Orion mini guider - BAD mistake - got a star, BUT, at the expense of oblate stars compared to perfect stars through the other guidescope. Note to self - BUY LODESTAR! :)

Anyway, got down to 12° here, and the camera was running near the end at -5.4°.

Targets covered was 2 hours each NGC 3324 and 3372 (building the mosaic I always needed to finish from last year), another solid hour on M83 (that's 3.5hrs total on it now), and 30 minutes on ρ-Ophiuchi (where I was having guider issues, as I didn't want to guide off too high SNR stars).

I'd rate it 8 out of 10 tonight. Planetary visual was average, but better than it has been. Once the moon set, even in light pollution central, I could CLEARLY see the wilky way, visually make out Eta Carinae etc.

Now to process all those shots - enough there now to make DSS work :)

[strongmanmike]

Sounds like you had a great night :clap:

Mike

[naskies]

Yet another clear night!!! After the past summer, this is amazing!

I've finally got most of my equipment configuration and set up issues sorted out and started some narrowband imaging, though I'm trying to get MaxPoint to play nicely. Very satisfying being able to slew across half the sky and have the target pop up only a few arc mins off centre :)

[cybereye]

And there I was, sitting on the side of a soccer field watching my youngest son train....:mad2:

[hotspur]

Hopefully you might be able to come up soon Dave.Anthony came up Saturday night,and got some great imaging done,got down to 4 degrees,we had the brazier going.

[naskies]

Aaaand... it's over in Brisbane :( It was a beautiful run of (mostly) cloud free evenings for the past 5 nights. Such a teaser of what we've been missing!



Thanks Chris. That's becoming chilly! I'm becoming quite busy with study unfortunately, so between the poor weather and other commitments I haven't made it out to a dark site in months. Someday soon hopefully!

[LewisM]

It'll be back Dave - patience! Hey, it's full moon anyway, so no loss. I don't even bother checking to see how clear it is the past 2 nights.

[naskies]

Luckily tonight's looking good again here in Bris. Once you're onto H-alpha imaging I think you'll find that clear nights even during new moon are quite useful ;)

[RobF]

Yep, you make do with what you get of late :)

One thing about shooting long Ha subs - more time to watch the TV in between :D
I love my long USB cables

[naskies]

I have about 100 m of Cat 6 cable running from my home network to my scope + computer in the back yard... warmer than sleeping in the tent, and saves having to run back and forth between the house and scope :)