![\"\"](\"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/IMG_2494-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/IMG_2497-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/IMG_2499-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/IMG_2500-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\tA little before sunset the shadows were steep enough to cover my mount and telescope so I worked on completing my setup and getting as many things ready as I could before nightfall. \u00a0I noticed some\u00a0clouds building up in the west but they never seemed to reach above 15 degrees or so.<\/p>\n
At 8pm I started taking calibration frames and by\u00a08:30 it was dark enough to start drift aligning. \u00a0I found there must have been something throwing off my compass because I was over\u00a05 degrees from the pole in azimuth. \u00a0It took around 30 minutes to get below an arc-minute. \u00a0By 9pm I was done and started building the pointing model for my mount (this tells the computer in the mount how to translate the coordinates for objects in its database to locations in the sky). \u00a0After this I calibrated the autoguider and then re-focused and got ready to start imaging. \u00a0Before taking my first exposure I took a test shot to calculate how long my light exposures should be. \u00a0I decided to go with 15 minutes, which for luminance is quite long. \u00a0I started the sequence around 9:25pm.<\/p>\n
I had to refocus quite frequently throughout the evening which I\u00a0think is related to mirror shift more than just temperature change. \u00a0Still, because I had 15 minutes between images I had plenty of time to walk around, talk to people and see what they were observing or doing.<\/p>\n
Probably the most interesting thing that happened all night was the ISS passing overhead. \u00a0James had the idea of trying to catch it in his scope and I was amazed he was able to do it. \u00a0I gave it a shot too and was amazed that\u00a0it wasn’t too difficult to keep in the eyepiece. \u00a0It was exceptionally bright, but despite the glare you could actually make out the solar panel arrays, which I think surprised all of us.<\/p>\n
Later on I tried to help Jim with his new planetary camera. \u00a0Not being familiar with Orion’s capture program I couldn’t help to much on the acquisition side but I was able to walk him through the use of Registax for stacking planetary images from video files.<\/p>\n
Darin showed James and myself a great view of Mars through his 16″ Dob. \u00a0It’s probably the best I’ve ever seen it. \u00a0You could clearly make out a polar ice cap, some of the dark surface markings and some bright haze around some of the edges which we suspected were clouds. \u00a0We also looked at the Eskimo nebula of which you could clearly see some of the structure.<\/p>\n
Through James’ scope we saw Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, M13 and M3. \u00a0All of them looked excellent. \u00a0At higher magnifications the planets zip through the eyepiece very quickly making it difficult to see specific details but I was still very impressed with\u00a0the views through that scope.<\/p>\n
The wind progressively increased through out the night causing my tracking to go nuts. \u00a0Eventually, I had to pull the dew shield off my scope. \u00a0That thing works as a sail and removing made a drastic improvement in my tracking accuracy. \u00a0However, around 12:30 it started to get very humid so I decided to call it a night and start shutting things down. \u00a0My last image came in around 1am and I started packing up.<\/p>\n
Once everything was in the car I said my goodbyes to everyone still awake on the field and tried to drive off without disturbing anyone. \u00a0I got home a little after 2:30 and by 3:00am was in bed and falling asleep.<\/p>\n
I combined the data I got from Southwestern with the data from CTSP and was pleased with the results. \u00a0I think I’m going to need about 4 times as much exposure time to get the result I am looking for though (I currently have 4.7 hours). \u00a0Here’s the work-in-progress\u00a0image, hope you like it: All in all it was an excellent night with good company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CTSP was scheduled for this Friday and since the weather was looking good I decided to take a little break from work and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-events","category-images"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![\"2014_04_25_HD800_ATIK314E_NGC5614_L_b1x1_11x600s_12x900s_crop_dbe_deconv_hist_hdr_lhe_nr\"](\"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/2014_04_25_HD800_ATIK314E_NGC5614_L_b1x1_11x600s_12x900s_crop_dbe_deconv_hist_hdr_lhe_nr.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n