Had a bit of high cloud around sunset tonight, but there was almost no wind so decided to set the scope up. Got it setup and polar aligned before dinner. Invited a mate out from town as well, thought we;d do some lunar imaging then try to catch the occultation of Antares.
Seeing was very ordinary, high res captures looked very muddy, so reverted to secondary focus. As it got closer to the occultation, everything was looking really good... the clouds had cleared completely, ice was forming on all my gear but not on the corrector plate, I remembered to sync the clock on the laptop just a few minutes before the event...
I decided to take a few avis about a minute apart leading up to the occultation to make a stack or animation. Had it all framed nicely to get the moon appearing in from the the LHS of frame.
Then... on the second avi... "IC Capture has experienced a problem and needs to close".
Restarted it, and tried again, this time it hung properly... I had to kill the PC with the power button
... started it up again and by the time I got an image back up on the screen it was 21:58 and the frame was full of moon
.
The best laid plans of mice and men...
Here's the one image I salvaged from the first avi sequence of the moon approaching Antares. C8, DMK @ secondary focus, IC Capture, 60 FPS, 100 frames from 600, stacked in Registax, wavelets: 1=10.5, 2=5.6.
I am going to bed now...
not going to wait up for the reappearance...
Al.
