May 21 2017.
Recently had a trip to a dark sky site.
Sadly it coincided with a full glaring moon! And that moon is bright up in the mountains!
So I had some serious obstacles for a DSO. I figured that since NGC 3372 is so bright it should still shine through and it did!
With a full moon I was able to see the same amount of stars that I normally would from my light polluted back yard on a clear moonless night!
To give you an idea of that moon strength I took a pic with it in among the clouds casting it's evil glare down on us!
Almost makes the sky seem blue near it!
On the first night I had horrible clouds to contend with and a few decent sucker holes. So the binoculars had to do the tour of duty.
I also snapped what is possibly the first proof there are weather gods watching us! I took this image where the moon was behind the clouds and it looked like a eye looking through the clouds, well to my mind anyhow.
They were probably doing a check on what astro equipment I had brought along.
Here is a pic of the AP night's setup.
I came out for occasional checks as it was COLD out, it snowed on our last night there!
So here is NGC 3372.
Camera settings as follows:
Skywatcher 102 Synscan goto.
ISO 800
133 X 20 second exposures
Canon 1200D(no mods)
Stacked with DSS and processed in Star Tools 1.4
This is a process in progress, I am not very happy with the results and have re-processed this a 1000 times already.
So this image will be the one to grace this blog until I get better at the processing.
Still struggling with star colour and bloat, along with the CA that is inherent with my scope.
I have also had to crop the image a lot due to field rotation and to reduce it to a more workable size in star tools without binning.
Also managed to capture a image of Venus at dawn, it is to the top right of the tree.
And last but not least I had the dob out one night and dodged clouds looking at some of my favourite constellations and the treasures contained within each.
The image was taken after completing collimation and setting the scope out to cool and acclimatize.
So that was my 5 day adventure under dark skies and a full moon.
All that is missing is a image I took of the milky way early one AM when the moon had set. I copied it onto a external drive and did a clean up and saved it where I cannot find it now, so will post that when I find the file.
Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment.
