Sunday, August 19, 2012

Andromeda and NGC 129

I collimated my scope again - it did not seem to be too difficult.

Oh, and I read somewhere that the 2 start alignment is better then the 3 star. Tried it and it worked pretty well on first try. Maybe just luck, or it's really better.

Because it was so quick, I thought about an object to take photos of: Andromeda! Setup, focusing... all went well. But then I could not take 30 seconds long pictures. All of them had stripes :-( I had to go down to 10 seconds. That sucks! Will take almost an hour to get 30 minutes of exposure time!!!

... so, I broke down and ordered the equatorial mount, the finder scope and the CCD camera. All will be shipped next week. That will be fun to setup and try out.

But I didn't take any flats and flat darks - which means I'll have to get up tomorrow morning at 5 and do that :-(

... of course, it was overcast in the morning :-)

Took flats later in the day and processed my images from Andromeda. Based on the initial pictures, I'm surprised what I got out:

I said this before, I really have to get better at the post processing...

NGC 129 did not turn out that well:

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