Planets, Sharing and nothing doing

The forecast was wrong again... odd that. So as the evening wore on the skies cleared. Enough so that I could actually see the skies in the west. I tried to find Mercury, both unaided and with the 10x50s. I even went as far as to pop the bins on the satcatcher and use that to get them pointed at the right spot. Nothing doing. Not a shine of the elusive little winged one.

Anyway, a little later, and with friends over, I was asked to setup the scope for a look at Saturn. I grabbed the Skymax on the NexStar, a great little combination for this sort of thing, levelled, aligned on Saturn, and tried a number of EP combinations. I ended up using the 5mm Hyperion, which for proper observing, giving x260, is a little OTT given the 102mm aperture, but for showing someone who's not looking for proper observing, the view was fine. Even to the point of seeing a moon or two. After everyone had taken their turn at the ep, I had another look, and cleared up. Putting the power pack back on charge.

About an hour later, the sky still being clear, I grabbed the Guided setup and went out for an imaging session. I'd decided to have a go at the S@N imaging challenge, to capture Markarians chain with about 200-400mm. I setup the camera piggy backed on the Konus, focused using Saturn. I put the Meade DSI on the C80ED with the intention of attmepting to use it for imaging, and tried the SPC900 on the Konus for guiding, in theory, PHD is able to use a normal webcam by stakcing frames on the fly. Well, suffice to say things were not to be. I had to add the second weight to get balanced. The Goto align didn't want to play ball, and no matter what I did everything was out a little (It's just this minute occurred to me why DOH!!!) I spent ages trying to get the SPC900 and the Meade focused, only to find that no matter what I did, I couldn't get PHD to find a star at all with the SPC900. I then tried to guide using the Meade on the C80ED, and for the first few attempts, PHD threw errors saying it couldn't talk to the mount. I ended up having to close PHD and start again. Then PHD calibrated ok and it sort of worked in that not quite kind of way for about 2 minutes... throwing Low SNR errors and losing the star a little afterwards.

I then moved the Meade back to the Vista, and again had to refocus, I finally managed to do this, went off to try again, set the camera running, checked the frame capture and no stars at all. The objective lens had dewed up. No dew shield on the camera lens. The scopes objectives were much better, but even they were beginning to dew up. I decided enough was enough, slewed around to Saturn again, put the camera back on the C80ED, sorted out focus, packed up and came in. Now to warm up.

Showing everyone Saturn and a moon was great, but I got frustrated with everything else, so largely one of those nights. Better luck next time.