Dirty Skies

Archive for May, 2005

I went out tonight to test out some new items I bought. Namely an electric focuser, a 3X Barlow, and a 9.7mm Plössl eyepiece. Everything worked out fairly well.

I plugged in the LPI to try some shots of Jupter through the new Barlow and had a tough time finding the planet in the monitor. After about 30 minutes I discovered the scope was roughly pointed right at it but the fact that my scope doesn’t collect enough light in conjunction with the image being out of focus, rendered it invisible on my computer monitor. After riding the focus all the way out and in I “found” it as it came into focus … just in time for the sky to cloud over for the evening. I mean I was about to push record and it disappeared! I looked up and saw a cloud had covered it and behind was a whole sky of unbroken cloud. Another time I guess.

I found another image stacking program tonight with an auto-align feature. As it indicates on it’s webpage, Lynkeos seems geared more towards planetary image processing as opposed to lunar. This proved out as I reprocessed some of the other evening’s images of the Moon and Jupiter.