Hi
The Newcastle Astronomical Society had it's viewing night at it's Shortland site last night, so I bought along my portable imaging rig, using the 6 inch Cometracker F3.6 SN. The Sampson GEM mount's drive is very frugal on power, only drawing about 0.3 of an amp from my folk's small car's battery. I ran the laptop on its own battery which is good for a few hours.
Image is 7x5 mins iSO400. Idas uv/ir filter used. Baader MPCC coma corrector, Hutech Modded 350D camera. Hand guided using Q guider cam on laptop screen. I found the SCP in Octans with the nice bright 50mm finder scope easy enough, as I had the pier perfectly vertical when I last polar aligned, so I used a spirit level to do that at the site, then move it in azimuth till I spotted the SCP area, rotating the RA axis watching the stars rotate round the SCP area. I used Star Atlas pro on the laptop to locate the galaxy group and manually pointed the scope there.
The Orion Short tube guidescope always has at least one usable guide star on the Qguider chip no matter where its pointed, so I began guiding. It was fun leaning back in my collapsable camp chair, talkign to the viewing nights attendees while guiding, which went quite well, not a great many corrections to be made.
After 7 images three things happened simultaniously. High cloud appeared. The dew got heavy and just started to fog the corrector plate, and the cameras battery died, so i packed up and then chatted with the others for a while. I was happy with getting 7 subs in anyway. It was the first time Id had the 6 inch there as an imaging scope, and it showed that along with the 300mm lens from Bert, they make great portable .
All in all it was a most enjoyable night. We had a good roll up. The site is somewhat darker then my place despite being only 5 mins drive away. The big expanse of the Hexham Swamp helps there
Scott
A visually pleasing field of view presented Scott. Just 35mins of data has brought out some nice detail in the galaxies. Shame about the weather and batteries running flat. I hope you have more success next time at the dark sky site.
Heard about your determined keen effort from Al and Dave, nice result.
Dave and I (well Dave really..I watched ) just finished compiling a nice new comupter from bits bought at the markets today - Pentium core 2 duo 3ghz, 4gig fast RAM, 2 X 512gig hard drives, fast DVD burner, 1gig 8600 GForce graphics. So image processing (and gaming etc) should be a bit faster now
See ya you imaging trooper, salute
Last edited by strongmanmike; 30-06-2008 at 12:16 AM.
) just finished compiling a nice new comupter from bits bought at the markets today - Pentium core 2 duo 3ghz, 4gig fast RAM, 2 X 512gig hard drives, fast DVD burner, 1gig 8600 GForce graphics. So image processing (and gaming etc) should be a bit faster now 
