First Image, and OAG repairs

Great clear full-moon nights throughout the weekend.  Even on clear nights, the dew forming on the corrector plate each night around midnight pretty-much terminated each session.  Just one photo to show for it, but I learned much and configured my gear better than any previous session...

The moon, using my Williams Optics 80mm refractor, piggy-back mounted on an un-guided polar-aligned LX-200 12" scope.  I didn't record the exposure time.

So, what did I really accomplish this weekend?  First and foremost, I figured out a lot about my off-axis-guider.  The Orion OAG is now focused for my reticle 9mm eyepiece (for guiding) and my 5D mark ii, for the first time ever.

Thoughts on the Orion OAG...  The prism-adjustment knob is poorly designed, with the net effect of my wasting at least 10 hours trying to get an image of a star into the guiding eyepiece.  The prism adjustment screw was incorrectly offset around the prism adjust-plunger, so that the prism remained pointed completely off the optical path of the scope. The knob would do nothing to deflect the prism, hence I saw nothing through the finder eyepiece.

A helpful blog post by Tom Polakis in cloudy-nights from 2004 showed the same problem.  I did some minor surgery on the OAG, got the adjustment pin in the correct position, and voila...  I now can see images in the eyepiece.

As for the image above, I learned all about Maxim DL's screen-strech functions and saving options to adjust the image to make the details visible.  Pre- screen-stretch, nothing was visible except a white circle on the image.  The image is noisy, and not ideally focused, but hey, it's a first.

Finally, after sunrise and dew-evaporation, I used some daylight landmarks to finally get the OAG focus adjusted for the two paths.  With that accomplished, I'm now ready to do some long-exposure photography on the next clear night.  Gotta put all the equipment away now...

Haywood

The first entry in my Astrophotography Blog...

This Blog is intended to be a record of my developing skills, successes and failures in capturing images of the night sky.  I'll make a separate entry describing who I am and what my astro-photography experience is... Suffice to say, I have had very few successful attempts to capture images, especially when weighed against the equipment and software I've acquired in my previous attempts.  Here's a brief list of the equipment I currently possess:

Meade 12" LX-200GPS-SMT (2004-era scope)
Coronado SolarMax 90 Double Stack Hydrogen-Alpha scope
Meade Ultra-Wedge
Canon 5d Mark II
Williams Optics Zenithstar 80mm refractor
Losmandy dovetail-plate system for the Meade scope
Orion Off-Axis Guider
Meade 1:1.6 focal reducer
Orion Flip Mirror
12volt car-battery charger - powers the Meade
Vixen Alt-Az manual mount for SolarMax scope

Notice there is no dome mentioned in the above list... I have to drag this out and pack it up before/after every observing session.  This will continue for at least the next 3 years, so no permanent installations are possible for the foreseeable future.

Late-May weather in VA-permitting, I'll be attempting to improve the collimation on the Meade tonight...  So far, the meade's performance has been weak for many years due to my incompetent previous collimation attempts.  The replacement of allen-bolts with Bob's Knobs last month has gotten my meade scope as collimated as it's ever been, so I think I've got a good chance during my next session to finally get some quality (for me) images out of the setup soon...

That's it for now.  I'll post some previous pictures from our Solar Eclipse trips, Venus Transit images, and the better of my images from the un-collimated equipment I'd been trying to tweak over the past few months.

Thanks for reading, and hope this blog is worthwhile.  I realize this may only be read by me, and in that case I hope it serves as a means to collect lessons-learned which I can use to build up my skills.

Cheers,
Haywood