imaged Jupiter (Etobicoke)

Manuel wanted to photograph Jupiter. It was scheduled to rise at 9:00 PM sharp and go above the 2x airmass threshold around midnight. The roof line of the houses to the east were a few more degrees up. We waited.

Sadly, after all our prep, the extra time spent on polar alignment, I could not see the end of the handle in the Big Dipper. It had set behind the roof line of the houses to the north-west. No chance for the supernova in M101...

12:13 AM. We were ready to image with the Celestron 9.25" SCT. Particularly now that we had a very good polar alignment with the Orion Atlas mount.

He hooked up his new DFK 21AU04 CCD USB camera from The Imaging Source to the f/10, 2350 mm focal length telescope. With the 2x barlow. So now we had a f/20, 4700 mm fl. Manuel did not set up the guiding camera. Nor did he set up his (new) dew heating equipment.

While we were waiting, I tried to look up the camera settings in SkyTools3. Was curious what it would recommend in terms of settings. Sadly, I did not find this camera listed. That would mean I'd need to build my own profile. Didn't know where to start really. Without good internet access in the middle of the parkette, I couldn't research it. And I didn't feel like reading the docs...

I added the MallinCam colour, just to have something.

The seeing was pretty bad. We saw only minor drifting during our imaging runs. We imaged for about an hour or so. We captured about 6 or so AVI files.

The planet never got above 50° elevation...

At one point, with the Celestron E-Lux 25mm Plössl eyepiece, with the help of the Telrad, I took a quick peek at M57.

1:45 AM. We packed up everything and moved inside. It was pretty late and I was tired.

We agreed to our original plan to meet up tomorrow. This session's objective was to collimate the 8" SCT...