Wednesday, September 30, 2015

This week's Supermoon Lunar Eclipse.

Wow!  Sometimes our Seattle crud just forgets to squat over the Puget Sound area and ruin all the fun when something happens in the sky at night.  This week's lunar eclipse which lined up nicely with a "supermoon" was totally visible from here. 
I'll count this as the first eclipse from the new Crest Astroshack.  Here are some photos taken with the Orion 80ED scope and the Canon 60Da.  I pulled out my CLS light pollution filter for the event (I normally never take that out of the camera for deep sky stuff) since the moon IS light pollution anyway!

Just past totality

Earth's shadow uncovering the moon again.

The light is not from the moon, but annoying neighbor's annoying light trespass. 

Thursday, September 17, 2015

A few more recent test images from the Crest Astro-shack

Behind on the blog a usual, but here are a few more photos from the newly operational observatory.  I still have to try out some "serious" imaging with darks, flats, lots of stacked frames, and the required frustrated cussing! 
These are just some more quick test images to see how the autoguiding is working.  It's working fairly well, I still have some star elongation, but there are ways to "cheat" a little, when processing, but I really hate doing that!


M-16 Eagle.  Always a cool target!

Not a bad start at the Crescent Nebula.

Scale Model of Solar System

Of course they don't include Pluto, but this is a pretty cool short video about some guys that make a scale model of  the solar system.


 
 
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