Last night I thought I would test out the new HEQ5 pro and christen the losmandy side by side saddle plate, the Orion 80mm shorty scope as the guide scope. I decided to use the 400D and the Russian fish eye lens I bought a while ago. Literally last minute decision, all I did was line up by eye the south pole with the mount, rough level (there is no bubble level on the HEQ5 pro) and just let the beast autoguide using the laptop. Crux of course is the views I have to the south and south west, the Orion one is obviously the western/northern view.
It is quite clear that the northern/western views are my darkest, but mate you have to use a light pollution filter of some description. I bought an astronomik internal canon CLS filter yesterday hope it arrives today.
I need an observatory took about 40 minutes to set up and the same to pull down, and I never spent time polar aligning or drift aligning, and this was a simple setup!! The images are crap, I did the best focus I could (I used focus assist) but the lens wont let everything come into focus at the same time for some reason, ie the outer edges are terrible!!
Anyway at least I can say I sampled this beaut weather we are having!!! BTw the images are a stack of three 230 second exposures at iso 400 in a bog standard 400D. I certainly know the result would have been different with the cooled camera but I seem to have misplaced that one
.???? LOL
O how I wished I was going to SPSP this year........
