Quote:
Originally Posted by Dennis
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.
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A little bit rusty I see.
I'm glad the clouds finally cooperated and cleared for you Dennis.
It can get sooooo frustrating when you have all your imaging equipment set up all ready to go. Then in a blink of an eye, what do you know. A thick blanket of clouds has already covered the night sky. It has happened to me too many times.
You captured a very nice pic there Dennis. Lovely detail and colour. Well done.
