Well it's going to rain for a month now as I'm off to Bintel in the morning to pickup my new, well ex demo GSO RC8 with Carbon tube
and the old Meade 8" SCT and I mean old as it's about twenty five years or more old but mind you still in first class condition will be retired.
The surprise addition to the update is a Canon EOS 550D SLR for imaging with. Not that I didn't like using my Pentax K5D but with Backyard EOS I'll be able to do it a lot easier as there was no Astro specific software for the Pentax but that's ok as it'll free up the Pentax for other work, time lapse etc.
You see dear old dad at 89 has been a compulsive buyer and had bought the 550D about twelve months back because he liked the one my younger brother had shown him, took about ten pictures with it and then it sat there until the battery went flat, does that with a lot of things.
Anyway the poor old guy has not been too good of late and while doing regular clean up for him I asked to borrow it try on my new scope and for services rendered he said oh you just keep it I'll not be using it. You see he'd just had his drivers licence taken away not bad for almost ninety years old.
The sad part about this is two days later I had him in hospital with a suspected small stroke, still waiting on scan results for that. It looks like I have much bigger job in front of me now.
Anyway really looking forward to putting the RC8 along side the ED80 and my hope is to improve my imaging of deep space objects and make using the setup a little easier but some other priorities first so wish me luck with dear old dad and thanks for taking the time to read this.
