I had the real pleasure last night of watching some newbies get their first taste of planetary imaging. It was a big night, really exhausting but what a hoot.
Over the past few weeks I've been conduction a Planetary Imaging for Beginners course at the Mapleton School Community Observatory. This was specifically aimed at total newbies with very little observing and no imaging experience. No gear required, but bring it if you have it, just turn up and have some fun. I've kept the class small so everyone gets to most out of it. Ages ranged from about 15 up to ....well older than me
.
Well after a couple of weeks of diddling around the edges, looking at gear, watching how it was done and all the other bits and pieces that go into catching that special image, last night was the big 5 hour practical night. I had my 8" meade on hand, there was the observatory's 11" celestron, plus a few "bring alongs". We ran from 7:00 til nearly 00:00 and what a great night. Seeing was only around 3-4/10 but the GRS was due at 23:00 at almost the same time that Europe went into occultaion.
Those that bought gear spent the first part of the night trying to get some results from their own gear, with mixed results. I had a number of different cameras there for people to try out, and of course the ToUcam won hands down for versitility and and ease of use.
By about 22:00 those that had bought their own gear and had found the challenge challenging
had either moved over to the young man operating my gear or inside to the relative warmth of the observatory and the 11".
Well I must say, I think they had a hoot of a time. Learning how to collimate an SCT in less than optimal conditions, how to drive the Losmandy G11, how to find that damn planet in a 3x2mm chip
, How big can you get jupiter and still have detail visible, (I can give you the direction on how to get jupiter so big it overflows the dimensions of the chip if you like
reslolution is up the spout though
).
In the end young Aden outside ran off about 25 or so Avies leading up to GRS transit and those inside snagged around 20 or so of which they took 3 home to work on. (They'll be back for the rest I'm sure, once they get their teeth into the ones they took home
) I do know that those that are looking at taking up this addiction are all talking of getting 300gig external hard drives for their computers
The end results weren't the best in the world but they will definately get results from them. And I'm pretty sure that there are at least 4 or 5 new converts to the planetary imaging corp. One gentleman has already booked in to my DSO imaging for beginners hopefully to run at the end of the year and is off to some big trade fair in Brisbane this weekend with a list in his pocket of scopes wanted by others on the course. Now this is how you hook 'em, play 'em and then reel 'em in
It's sad really. Get someone bitten by the astronomy bug and there is just no helping them after that. It has been great fun though. Next Tuesday night will probably be the final night where we look at the images that have been taken and processed over the weekend and how improvements can be made in processing. I'm hopeful that the observatory will be sent some of the images that have been processed and we can put them up on the web page. I'll post details if it happens.
As I said we finished around 00:00 and I felt as though I had done a full day at work. Thouroughly satisfying though.
I hope it's not fine tonight, I couldn't take another late night.
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Imaging 
