TIme: 20:00 to 23:00
Goal: To try to capture M42 and M43 to add to my
Temp: -9*C
40 km wind from the North (brrr....)
Locale: My backyard, suburbs of Winnipeg,
Seeing: Good
Transparency: Fair to Good
Gear: 14.5"
Camera and mount: Ioptron skyguider pro mount on a vintage wooden Vixen tripod, Canon 60D, Optolong cls-
Lens: Rokinon 135mm
As promised I am determined to get more visual astro in this new year and thus far the skies have been OK. The winds were up a bit from the north but my planner said I had a clear patch until midnight. I moved all my stuff from the sunroom (or should I call this my staging area?) out to the patio.
My partner checked out my winter astro clothing, and gave grudging approval to hoodie, puffer down jacket, overalls, felt mitts and felt lined boots. I may have resembled a pastry puppet!
I quickly did a check of M42 in the dobsonian, to check seeing and transparency. I could see the trapezium without difficulty at 92x but the E and especially F stars were winking in and out of my visual. Thus the sky conditions were nowhere near as good as they were earlier in the week. The nebulosity of M42 was still very prominent.
My camera was loaded with a new filter, the Optolong cls filter for light pollution. This was first light for this filter! A real test, too, because the
I did a polar alignment using the built in finder in the
I carried out a few ranging shots to find my target and focus.... WTH!!! The stars were trails... BIG trails. Oh hell, I had set the mount to track in the Southern Hemisphere!! :sigh: After some mumbling, cussing and laughing at myself, I redid the polar alignment just for fun and reset the mount to track for Northern targets, and bingo, nice round stars.
With the intervalometer set to capture 20 lights, I used settings of 640 ISO, 30 second exposures, x 20. At these settings I found that the
Thus begins my blog and journey to capture all of the 110
The image below is a single exposure with my 135mm Rokinon manual lens, 30 sec, ISO 640,
Thanks for reading from the bottom.