Well, what a night that was! My first outing since Nov last year and I was all fingers and thumbs.
- It took me 3 hours to set up and get going; I was sooooo rusty.
- The Moon had risen by the time I had got my act together.
- We had a power cut part way through the evening and I lost a batch of 5 minute exposures - I heard the local sub-station go "whuumphhh" as the lights went off.
- I forgot to fasten the mount locking knob that fastens the mount to the tripod head – luckily it was all well balanced.
- I forgot to tighten the clamp on the DEC shaft of the Tak mount, so it wobbled as the mount tracked.
- I couldn’t find the spacers to give the correct focusing distance for the Canon 40D on the Mewlon 180 and the Orion Deep Sky guide camera on the WO 66 so I had to bodge some adapters from various threaded rings that I had.
- I tried auto guiding without the GPUSB plugged in!
- At 11:30pm I read Matt’s e-mail about the occultation of Regulus by the Moon so I tore down the side-by-side system and replaced the Canon 40D with the DMK21AF04 and captured my first AVI around 11:55pm after a few trials and tribulations with the Firewire PCMCIA card.
- The clouds arrived just before mid night so at 1:00am I packed up.
Apart from those humorous misfortunes and operator incompetence, I had a ball; it was really, really good be under the stars once more and I managed to rescue the following images of M42:
- 1 x 5 minute exposure
- 1 x 3 minute exposure
- 10 x 60 second exposures
Here is the result, a central region 1024x768 crop from the full frame of 3888x2592.
- Mewlon 180 F12 at prime focus.
- Canon 40D (Live View for focus) with mains adapter.
- Guided through a side-by-side WO 66 Petval with Orion Deep Sky Star Shooter and GPUSB.
- Images aligned and combined in ImagesPlus 3.
- Curves, mild USM and cropped in CS3.
Oh, I also got to see Regulus kissing the Moon's limb through the finder scope just before ingress.
Cheers
Dennis