Third Night of Observing

Had my third night with the scope last night (tonight?). Shoveled the snow off the deck, dragged the scope out and got it polar aligned. The skies were quite good tonight but the moon is nearing full and that hurts the night vision, especially when you look at it directly through the scope ;-) I decided to take another try at imaging saturn. This time I was using a 15 mm Plossl eyepiece with the Canon G1 and tried various exposure settings. I ended up taking about 20 images that I stacked together into the following image.



Much better than my first attempt at Saturn. I also took a slew of images with a 2x barlow attached which were largely overexposed and Saturn drifted out of the field of view but I did image at least one moon (Titan?). I will have to check in Celestia to see where the moons are relative to Saturn to find out. By the time I got re-geared and filtered to start imaging the moon again, the temp had dropped another 4 degrees to -10 C and I discovered to my shock and horror that I had frost on my collector lens! Viewing was over for the evening. I guess I might need a dew shield/heater and perhaps a bigger battery to power it (I can see why people build observatories).

Anyway, I learn something new each time I go out. The Clear Sky Clocks predict a good night for observing tomorrow, Perhaps I'll try to image the moon tomorrow and see what I can observe of the Messier objects within the limited field of view that my back porch provides (damn trees!).

Wishing you (and me) clear skies!