Had another semi clear evening and wanted to try out the new camera again.
Taking images of the night sky by mounting the camera on the tripod.
I had a go at getting Orion into view and tried a few shots.

The wind was belting and it kept moving the camera tripod combination with the stronger gusts which ruined many of the subs.
One did finally come out fairly steady though.

Details: 8 sec exposure, ISO 800 at F5.0 and a focal lenght of 45.00mm.
I did the focusing manually and this is a lot tougher than one would expect when trying to peer through the eyepiece and focus on the stars!

So here is the processed version(Star tools).

The other thing that is quite astonishing is just how many stars are picked up by the camera!
With the naked eye only the brightest stars in the Orion constellation are visible, by my count about 12 or so.
And in the image there are hundreds!
Cannot wait to get the T Ring for the camera and get it attached to the scope!

Had almost 40mins of clear sky and decided to put the camera to the test again.

This time my focus was far better, I used Canopus to focus on before taking any images.
This shot was taken at ISO1600, 15 second exposure,focal lenght 51.0mm, aperture setting F5.6
Pointed in the general direction of Carina.
Processing was done with Star Tools.

Ran the meteor image through Star tools for some processing and this one looks far better.

I was very blessed and recieved a early birthday gift from my wonderful wife, a Canon 1200D DSLR!

Over a night or two I have been trying to figure out settings and what would be needed for a few nightscape images to start off my AP adventures.
Most of them turned out pretty awful and cannot be shown anywhere ever!

One that did give me a nice surprise though was a image with a meteor streaking toward Eta Carina!
This was caught with a 15 second exposure at ISO 800, it was not yet completely dark as can be seen in the image.
You can just begin to discern the Eta Carina nebula in the image, it appears as though the meteor is about to hit it.
And this makes me wonder what I would get from it with longer exposures and with it fully dark.
Of course this question will need to wait until after the clouds have cleared, no surprises there!!!

So here it is:

It's a good start and I hope to steadily improve from here.
Another thing I need to remember is not to shoot in JPEG mode but rather RAW mode.

Until next time...

OBSERVING REPORT- FEBRUARY 6, 2016

Sywatcher 102.

The skies cleared and I was able to get the Skywatcher 102 all set up and ready for some action.

My main goal was to master the alignment.
And would you believe it! On the first try I had success.
DO NOT start from the park position!!!!
That seemed to sort out a lot of my previous failures.

Thereafter I hooked up the PC and got Stellerium up and running and controlling the scope.
Was nice and easy and gave no problems there.
I was also using a car battery as my power source for the first time.
Earlier in the day I had made a nice set of cables to connect to the battery from the scope.

So all set up and ready to get this ship sailing!
First stop was M42, since it was already nice and high and would soon disappear behind my house roof so it was first.
And let me say that unless you have the tripod legs extended all the way, objects at or close to zenith can be a challenge!

From there it was a freestyle surf about!
Randomly selected objects from Stellerium and CTRL+1 got me there every time.
The goto accuracy was reasonably good and I tried using the PAE function to refine it.

Some targets for the night include, Eta Carina, Omega Centauri, Jewel box, Southern Pleiades, pearl cluster,wishing well cluster, running chicken nebula,M47 and a host of OC, GC's and I even split Acrux using the 4mm ep.
Sadly my LP here prevents me from finding galaxies and planetary nebula.
Looks like anything beyond 7.5mag is a bust for me.'
Only the odd GC stands out after that Mag.

When viewing Jupiter the CA is obvious, as it is on brighter stars like Sirius or Canopus.
This it not a deal breaker for me and is more than livable.

Two things that could improve the general experience with this scope would have to be a decent 90 degree diagonal and a 90 degree angle finder scope.
These straight through 6X30 finders are as much a pain in the butt as a RDF!
Thankfully it is only for the initial alignment!

So I am very happy with the overall performance of the scope and will enjoy using it going forward.

The night was a complete success with  six hours at the EP!
No sketching was done at this sitting as it was intended for getting the hang of this GOTO technology.
The one drawback I noticed in this regard is that the Tarantula nebula is just a dim smudge in the 102 with no improvement under higher magnification, so a sketch in the 102 of this target will be out of the question.
Lucky for the 8" dob!!

So I am one happy camper!

February 6th 2016.

The day started out all cloudy and cleared nicely toward 11AM.
I have charged a car battery and made a nice connection to the scope for it and decided to test it by doing some solar viewing.
I still cannot seem to get the mount to do solar tracking!
I am sure I will figure it out in time.

So here is a image I managed to capture of AR2494.
This was taken straight through the eyepiece(15mm) with a point and shoot compact camera.
Scope used was the Skywatcher 102.