Sunday, June 9, 2013

Capturing Saturn and seeing a Meteor

It's been a while since I've had my rig out and I was worried that I'd miss Saturn.  After upgrading my firmware (Motor Control and Hand Control) I can now do All Star Polar Alignment.  The idea is even if you can't see the North Star you can do an accurate Polar Alignment...

What they don't tell you is it's not much fun to do and even harder than doing a regular polar alignment using your polar scope.  They need to make an easier way to adjust the alt and az instead of doing the screws that are hard to reach while looking through the EP.  Anyway - once I was aligned it seemed to work OK.  I really need a dome so I can setup and stay aligned, but that's another issue to be dealt with later ($$$).

Saturn - the reason I was out there to begin with.


Here's my best shot of Saturn - I doubled the pixels to get it larger.  In the future I need to work out how to barlow my flip mirror, but for the time being I'm happy with the surface detail I achieved by limiting my exposure time to 4:10.  Any longer than 5 minutes and the planet rotation blurs the details - thanks Jerry Lodriguss for teaching me about that.

Below is all of the good shots with their ISO and shutter speed / exposure time (taking 1:1 video) - each one gave me about 3200 stills so that's not bad for lucky imaging.


These are 1:1 pixel sized so this is exactly the size I got from the camera.  You can see they are pretty small so my 2.5 barlow would have made a huge difference... I just need to work out how to stack the equipment up without being unstable.

Things to do next time
  • Set up a little earlier when it's getting close to dark and use a real compass to align the mount so I'm relatively close.
  • Use my barlow to get 2.5 x magnification - with my C8 I'm getting plenty of light, just need to get up close.
Bonus
As a plus I saw a nice meteor in Scorpius (see below for the location from Skymap HD).  I haven't ever really done any good watching for meteors, but since I was already pointed in that general direction I saw a really nice one during this relatively minor shower (2/hour isn't anything special so seeing one is cool).