2014-10-28

The weather is driving me nuts! Two weekends straight it has been a Venus-like atmosphere. Me and Jakob have wished for a sky free of clowds for three weeks now and we really had hopes for the coming Friday. This was going to be the first real astronomy session of the year. The weather this week has been good so far with clear skyes both day and night, but the weather forecast is now talking about clowds just in time for the night we planned for. This is humiliating! 🙁

In the absence of the real deal I made a try this Tuesday from my balcony again. The main goal was to try out the new field flattener which arrived last week, and I must say the difference from the last picture is clearly visible. Can you see it? 🙂

NGC281 – Pacman Nebula

I really hope now that the weather will be a little better from now on because the sky quality is mostly limited from Älvsjö!

2014-10-17

This night was going to be the first serious session of the season. Me and Jakob went out to Ekerö in hope that we were going to catch Eris for the first time. As usual the weather was not on our side, but we also had a couple of things to do indoors to optimize the equipment so this was not a critical issue. I had a problem with the optical line of the APO that needed to be fixed and we also had to update the astro-computer and install some new programs.

It was an exclusively indoor night with a lot of geeky discussions and internet surfing on new equipment and issues. One new problem that came up was when we were trying to remote control my LX200 from the computer. For Jakobs EQ6-mount from Skywatcher there is a brilliant program from ASCOM for that purpose called EQMOD, but we weren’t able to find a good substitute for the LX200 🙁 Anyone who knows about such a program ??

2014-09-30

I had another astro night at my balcony. The plan was to photograph two galaxies (NGC 185 and NGC 147) between Andromeda and Cassiopeia. They are quite dim (magnitudes around 9) so I didn’t have much hope in finding them with the Astrotrac mount. Despite these conditions I eventually found it and I let the camera roll for about an our. However I discovered from the result that something in the optical line in my APO refractor isn’t right and I suspect it to be a misaligned focuser. The stars in the pictures got oval and I know is not due to vignetting. I have to get this focuser fixed!

When I was searching for the galaxies I ran over the Dragonfly cluster close to Cassiopeia as a coincidence. I have never heard of the cluster before but I have to admit that you can (with a little fantasy) see the dragonfly shape… Anyway I took a couple of exposures of it and the result was acceptable despite the problem with the misaligned focuser.

NGC457 – Dragonfly cluster

I also got the chance to experience the actual difference between using the CLS filter and not using it. I took a couple of test exposures at the Andromeda Galaxy to show it.

CLS-filter