Vern’s Weblog

Image of the moon from yesterday, Saturday evening, at lunation 10.6.

Clear skies again here in Louisville, CO; temperature around 24°F; no wind; humidity 45%; transparency very good; and turbulence fair, around 5/10. Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, F6.3 focal reducer, and Canon Xti digital camera at 1/1250 sec shutter and ASA 400. Since illuminated portion no longer fits into camera’s FOV, it was necessary to acquire images for northern and southern hemispheres and then combine them. Thirty images for each hemisphere were aligned, stacked, and wavelet filtered with Registarx4 and then cropped, aligned, and merged with Photoshop2.

The moon earlier this evening at lunation 7.46.

Image taken from Louisville, CO at 6:07pm with Celestron Nexstar11 with F6.3 focal reducer and Canon Xti digital camera (1/1000 sec exposure at ASA400).  Temperature was about 40°F, hazy with high thin clouds though transparency was still good, turbulence was 6/10. Unfortunately, another snowstorm is heading our way tomorrow.

 The Canon Xti with its high resolution is great to use for lunar images. As an example, below is crop of the above image at about 2/3 scale.

Some desktop wallpaper sizes are available, 1600×1200, 1280×1024, and 1024×760.

The waning moon around 4 am Sunday morning at lunation 19.53 days.

Images were taken with Celestron Nexstar 11 telescope, F6.3 focal reducer, and Canon Xti camera.  Camera set at ASA 400 and 1/1250 sec shutter. I had a number of problems starting around 3 am.  What should have been a 15 or 20 minute session to photograph the moon took more than hour.  The scope was drifting badly in declination, I assume because it was poorly north aligned despite my efforts earlier in the evening.  Focus in the angle finder on the camera didn’t agree with what the images showed despite numerous diopter adjustments.  I found some loose set screws in the ring adapter but the problem persisted.  I have yet to track down the cause.  Also, there was a thin haze and atmospheric turbulence wasn’t great (5/10), temperature about 34°F, and no wind.  

An image of the open cluster M45 in the constellation Taurus from last evening after moonrise.

Images taken from light polluted Louisville, CO with Stellarvue A1010 80mm refractor telescope and Canon Xti camera at direct focus. Nine 4 minute exposures were dark subtracted and flat field corrected, stacked, aligned and enhanced with ImagePlus. 

This was a guiding experiment using “PhdGuiding” software available from Stark Labs. Overall, the software did  a good job of guiding.  I have the Stellarvue mounted on a Losmandy rail on the Nexstar11.  A Stellacam II was used as a guide camera and the Nexstar11 as a guide scope. The Stellacam II is excellent as a guide cam due to its low light sensitivity.  No problem finding guide stars with the Stellacam!  The “Phd Guiding” user interface is quite good, far better than most packages. Setup up is simple and the price is right (free).  Only problem I had was the serial interface used to connect to the Celestron locked up after I exited the “Phd Guiding” program.  A logout corrected the problem. It only happened once fortunately. Automated guiding is certainly more fun than tweaking buttons.

Moon late Thursday evening at lunation 17. I created some desktop wallpaper sizes as well 1600×1200, 1280×1024, and 1024×760

Image taken with Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, F6.3 focal reducer, and Canon Xti camera at Cassegrain focus. Moon won’t quite fit in a single frame, so above image is actually a composite of two separate images. Each image created from 20 frames aligned and stacked with Registax4. Sky was clear, no wind, temperature 34° F, transparency excellent, and turbulence 7/10.