On the horns of the moon

A lovely crescent moon was riding the sky last night, and thankfully the predicted severe weather didn't materialise. There was mist high in the sky, so I didn't bother with attempting any deep sky imaging, and went for the moon instead. I put the Skymax outside for 30 minutes to acclimate before taking the HEQ5 out. The moon was low enough by this point, that I had to put the mount on the decking (a really poor choice of surface, as it bounces a lot) to be able to get an angle on it, thanks to the tall trees at the end of my neighbours garden. Still I figured I'd get an hour and decided I'd go for a mosaic using my webcam. So after levelling, polar aligning and balancing I got going.

This is a 10 pane mosaic using the SPC900, each pane was about 650 frames, stacked and processed using Registax, merged in iMerge and tweaked in GIMP.

Click for bigger


I also got an AVI of Saturn. It's not great, I've still got to work out the settings on the webcam properly, but this was using the Ultima x2 barlow.

800 of 1800 frames



As I was packing away, I left the Skymax outside for one last shot using the 450d at prime, and angled the camera to get this



I'd already checked and there was a flare (Iridium 21) predicted for about 20 minutes later, so I set up the Satcatcher and the 450d with the EF 50mm lens. Having made some modifications with different mounting plates (I have the same mounting plates and adapters on all my gear now, it makes swapping the camera about a lot easier) I need to tweak the configuration and may need to use a longer piece of wood as the compass wasn't pointing accurately. And to top things off, the clouds were moving in. So this was shot through the clouds, although, not the brightest of flares at Mag 0, it was still bright enough to cut through the clouds.