[Dennis]

Hello,

Last night (10th July) I was investigating/eliminating some of the potential causes of flexure in my side-by-side system and as part of the investigation, captured a series of 5 minute exposures of Pluto and the surrounding star field.

I am pleased to report that I made considerable progress in resolving some of the problems that were causing elongated stars, as well as managing to record the movement of Pluto against the background of fixed stars.

The animation is made up of 2 frames; Frame 1 recorded at 10:59pm and Frame 2 recorded at 11:54pm, so there is almost 1 hours worth of orbital movement in the animation. (In-line gif at 86KB)

Tak Mewlon 180 F12 (2160mm fl) with ST7 at prime focus.
The animation is a 600x400 crop from the 765x510 original.
FOV is approx. 8.5x5.6 arcmin at 0.86 arcsec/pixel.

Thanks for looking!

Cheers

Dennis

PS - some details about Pluto
Pluto is now a Dwarf Planet, Magnitude: 13.94.
Earth Distance: 30.7 AU
Sun Distance: 31.7 AU
Diameter: 2302.0 km