[Chaos-l] Observing session report 6/17/07, 9:30pm-12:30 am

[Andrew MacKay]

Greetings Chaos,

Thanks to Steve and Mark for showing me some sights down at Farrington.
I enjoyed views of Jupiter, the Trifid, and the Swan Nebula on Mark's
dob. I believe that I saw M64 on Steve's Dob. We sat around a little
while waiting for headlights from the boatlaunch to clear. It seemed
like a lot of time wasted actually, in addition to night vision
disruption.

I've been looking around for some good double stars with nice color
contrast, and found Cor Coroli to be a decent yellow/blue. I was going
through some of the Spring sights in Turn Left at Orion (Thanks Jon,
great suggestion), where I found Cor coroli and some galaxies (M94, M65
and M66). Also I viewed the Whirlpool Galaxy, okay in my 8 inch SC. I
also spent a bit of time viewing Saturn before it dipped below the
trees and later Jupiter rising. Despite heavy dewing, seeing was okay.
I attempted to get a decent image of Jupiter on my nextimage camera.
Via my eye, Jupiter looked great, with nice definition on the bands,
some whirls apparent. Visually, I did not make out the red spot;
however it was apparently transiting at about 10:30 pm that night
(skytonight.com tool). While my eye worked okay, I just could not get
any detail out of Jupiter on my nextimage camera. I'm pretty sure it
was focused. Either the CCD chip dewed up or its just a piece of junk.
Probably a little of both. I've invested in  a dew heater for the
corrector plate, but am not sure how to would protect a little webcam?

I'm really interested in imaging, and thought I'd start out with a
cheap camera and shoot the planets before moving to autoguiding and
more expensive CCDs or DSLR. Would anyone here recommend a Meade DSI,
and which model is acceptable?

Thanks and clear skies,
Andrew
  

 




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