Time flies when your having fun
, thought I'd spend a couple of hours testing out some new (2nd hand actually) gear recently acquired on eBay. First up was a colour, high sensitive CCD CCTV camera which I hooked up to an old Commodore 64 monitor I had sitting in a cupboard for years and prime focus in my 8" DOB...the couple hours turned into about 5 given it's probably the first decent night observing have had in a while...anyway after much trial and error with the settings have finally worked out a system for various objects. Thought the dob would be the easiest to muck around with as I didn't want the added frustration of getting the EQ6 aligned properly, tracking etc...anyhow, have been suitably impressed by the light gathering ability of this camera, was mainly looking at Jewell Box, Southern Pleides, Carina, etc...then pointed it to Canopus...wow, blew me away...it was just so enjoyable to point the dob at a star or cluster and just watch as the points of light slowly crept across the screen, no big deal with light pollution either...then pointed it over to Saturn, again after a bit of trial and error got a fairly decent showing, had to turn right down the variuous gain, shutter settings, brightness, etc as you can imagine. My next project will be to hook up an extension of the camera control buttons so I don't have to bump focus when making fine adjustments...I can also see the merit of getting an electric focusser
...anyhow time to pack up as the clouds have reappeared
