Vern’s Weblog

I was playing with my star chart program yesterday and noted that the planet Pluto moved enough over about an hour or so to be noticable. Since I’ve never even tried to find it before, I thought it might be fun to try.  I was a bit careless aligning the scope and so I missed getting Pluto in the center of the frame by about 10 arc-min. When I’m carefull, I can usually get with 3 or 4 (should have used precision goto as well). I compared the frames this morning, identified some of the brighter stars in the field, and confirmed that it is indeed Pluto on the left side of the frame. First frame was taken around 22:55 MDT and the other at 00:49 MDT.

Equipment was my usual deep sky setup, Celestron Nexstar11, F3.3 focal reducer, and Stellacam II video camera (gain 9/14, integrate 128, medium gamma).  Dark subtracted, flat field and bias corrected. Aligned and stacked two sets of 10 minute video with Registax3. Sky was clear, temperature

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Planetary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.