Scott Donnelly

First Light

Hey everyone, welcome to my new blog. I’ve started this to share my experiences with my new telescope, a 6” SCT. First Light, I’ve plumped for the obvious - Saturn. Managed to get the AS-GT properly aligned for the first time tonight, it’s took a bit of practice! Did a 2-star align on Capella and Sirius, then 2 calibration stars, Procyon and Castor. Immediately did a GoTo to Mars, and bang, dead center in the eyepiece with no visible drift. Decided to do a Polar Align from the HC, with the result being my most accurate align yet, K3CCD reported drift of 2.5” / min. (Anybody else have an AS-GT? is this good, bad, or normal?!)

Had a crack at collimating the scope, resulting in much sharper views than the first time I took the scope out. Still think I haven’t got it spot on though, I’m gonna give metaguide a go next time I think. Anyways, here is the result, here comes the science bit: Celestron C6-SGT, 900 frames at 15fps on a stock SPC900NC via a 2x barlow, captured and processed in K3CCDTools, best 181 frames stacked. Post-processing in K3CCDTools and the GIMP. The skies here in Birmingham are horrendously light polluted, and the seeing was not the best.

saturn_17-02-08

Last night happened to be the coldest so far this winter, at -6C! I had to call it quits at 1:30am, when my laptop screen iced over. :-) I kept having to blast the corrector plate with a hair dryer to remove the frost, I kept thinking my collimation had gone out, until I looked at the business end of the scope to see it looked like a shop window that had gone out of business, it was almost opaque!

I got some good practice in prior to next week’s eclipse anyway. I’ve booked the day off and I’m off out into the sticks to orange-free skys. Hopefully the weather will hold out and I can improve on this, but, its a start!

Scotty