Another go at the ringed one

Another fine night last night. I got out about 9:45 pm, and setup as usual. Leveled, powered up, planetary align on Saturn. Then swapped the visual pipes for the webcam pipes. Hmm, couldn't find saturn on screen. Swapped the cam for the 5mm Ortho, and re-centered. Swapped to the webcam again, and this time could see Saturn. So far so good. Added the 2x barlow. Still there. As I'd received the 5x Antares barlow during the day, I thought I'd try with that. I swapped the 2x out and again couldn't find Saturn on screen. What's going on here ? I went back to the 2x barlow, still no sign, back to the Ortho, re-centered again. Back to the 2x Barlow and webcam and tried to focus. This is getting silly. Every time I tough the focuser the image jumps off the screen. I'm going to have to do something about this.

Anyway, I finally managed to get something vaguely approaching focus and, using WXAstroCapture, shot off a short AVI of some 900 frames. Then I popped the lens cap on the scope and grabbed 200 frames of darks. All ready for later processing. This has taken an hour to get. After a process with Wavelets and a minor adjust in PS.



I then swapped back for visual use, dropped in the 5x barlow and the 5mm Hyperion and spent some time staring at Saturn. This is the first time I've seen the planet look like a sphere rather than a flat disk. And in the odd moments of sharper focus, I was able to clearly make out the rings. The problem is that this is seriously over powering my little scope, but I want to see what happens with the webcam, if I can ever get focus smoothly. I took this all out and swapped to the 17mm Hyperion.

After a visit to Stellarium to have a look at what interesting objects might be around. Having made a short list, I used the Goto to slew to the first target NGC2331 and was looking at a blank patch of sky. That's odd, this is supposed to be an open cluster. Hmm. I used the goto to slew to Mars. Hmm, way out. Ok, I don't know what has happened there, but I powered down, powered up, a quick planetary align on Mars, and try again. Still no good. Huh ?? I reset again, and did a full sky align. Still the goto was out by quite some distance. Ah well, enough of this. I can find the Beehive easily enough, so I used the manual controls to slew around to M44 and spent some time looking at this lovely cluster and tried to sketch it.



I've come to the conclusion I need a new focuser, what I have works ok for visual use, but for imaging, it's just no good. Ah well.