Moon and Satellites

For a change, after a clear, bright and hot day, the sky also stayed mostly clear with some odd wisps of clouds floating along. As the evening wore on, and the sky got ever so slowly (or so it seemed) darker, the six day old moon showed clearly to the south. About 2130 I grabbed all the gear and went out for a go at webcam imaging. The seeing wasn't great as the images were really quite wobbly. But with some persistence, I was able to capture a number of sequence of AVI's. It turns out upon reviewing them, I hadn't noticed at the time as I was typing away on AC, that during the midst of most of them, some of the cloud had drifted across and obscured the moon sufficiently, that the webcam had captured almost no data. In the end, I through away 6 of 8 of the images. This leaves one image at F10 and one image at F25. Now I'm having some problems stacking them in Registax at the moment, every attempt has ended with lines across the middle of the image, but I'm seeking help, watch this space for when the avi's are finally processed.

The mods I did to the focuser has certainly helped, the movement being much smoother, although at F20 (5x barlow) the image shift is still too severe for effective usage. I have on order a 5yd roll of stickon teflon that I'm going to use to pad out the drawtube and see what difference that makes.

Whilst the avi's were being captured there were also 3 Iridium flares I was keeping an eye out for. I set up the SatCatcher and set the camera to about mid range on the zoom.

Iridium 23 Mag -5


Iridium 76 Mag -0


Then whilst waiting for the next flare, I had a good long look at the region around Piccolomini. An interesting area, with the Piccolomini crater having a small semi circular chain of craters around it in almost a crown shape. I also had a play and comparison between the 2x barlow and the set of fine tuning rings with the 5mm Hyperion. The tuning rings make the ep a 2.5mm Hyperion, so in theory I ought to get the same image scale as using the 5mm with the barlow. Oddly, the image seemed to me, to be slightly larger with the barlow than with the tuning rings.

I looked up during this experimentation and spotted an interesting sight, and I just had to capture it. In the same area of the Sky, the Moon was shining, but nearby was Saturn and Mars and all three were visible. Now how could I not take a picture of it, it would have been rude.



Then it was almost time for the next Iridium, so I realigned the SatCatcher and got :

Iridium 58 Mag -0


I decided I'd have a go at imaging Saturn again, but the focuser really let me down, and I just couldn't get the image. It didn't help that after 10 minutes, the bushes along the edge of the garden started to get in the way. So I started to pack up. Whilst I was doing this, I thought I'd try an experiment about using the main tube itself as a finder. To do this, point a torch in the eyepiece end, and it would project out the Objective. I aligned the scope on a nearby tree and did just that. It worked quite well, but the torch I was using has three LED's in them, and it looked a bit like the Mysterons from Captain Scarlet. So I finished the night with a picture of this, just for the fun of it.