Observing Reports
August 2006
13.08.06
Sunday morning at around 00:30am I was out viewing the sky.
Clouds were visible low in the North and East but didn’t effect my night.
Managed to set all my equipment up without to many problems and thought I would give autoguiding another try.
Aligned the mount and carried out a quick drift alignment, I was using the Orion 80ED and I managed to locate so very faint stars with the guide scope and webcam.
I still find this pretty difficult to judge as the seeing was not that great. Ok then first test…………..an image of Altair (I think it was that star??)The image looked really good for a 60 second shot and didn’t show signs of any trailing.
Ok now for the real test, M27 (The Dumbbell Nebula). I managed to stack two images both just over 2 minutes of exposure. WOW! This is what I wanted to be able to achieve and this image gained from this is my best to date.
I messed about with the Guidedog setting maybe a bit too much as after my good images trailing was visible on the longer shots. Oh well….i shall try again another night.
On a separate note….the Perseius meteor shower was on view and I saw two very bright streaks. One of the meteors even left a smoke trail. Then the clouds rolled in and it was time for bed.
It was now 2am and I had a very successful night.