For those of you that are checking this blog to see how well the 20" telescope performed after it's mini-service, then the answer is ... pretty well. It may be a little louder and a play a slightly different tune while it's working but it is much smoother and hasn't been this easy to image on for a long while. We had what most telescope users expect, stars that keep pretty still for 10 30 second frames. There was some trailing, but not much, and not all that dancing about that I've been used to recently. So thanks - we got a lot of interesting pics taken last night. Here's one of them - a far out IC object called IC 342. It is a faint face-on galaxy in Camelopardalis and it is seen dimmed through the milky way's dust. So it may be close and 21 arc minutes across, but is only 9.2 magnitude. Only the middle spot showed up on the 30-second sub frames. So it was a bit of a swine to find; we successfully used a 14.2 magnitude galaxy as a GOTO/reference object!!
Saturday, 20 February 2010
IC 342
For those of you that are checking this blog to see how well the 20" telescope performed after it's mini-service, then the answer is ... pretty well. It may be a little louder and a play a slightly different tune while it's working but it is much smoother and hasn't been this easy to image on for a long while. We had what most telescope users expect, stars that keep pretty still for 10 30 second frames. There was some trailing, but not much, and not all that dancing about that I've been used to recently. So thanks - we got a lot of interesting pics taken last night. Here's one of them - a far out IC object called IC 342. It is a faint face-on galaxy in Camelopardalis and it is seen dimmed through the milky way's dust. So it may be close and 21 arc minutes across, but is only 9.2 magnitude. Only the middle spot showed up on the 30-second sub frames. So it was a bit of a swine to find; we successfully used a 14.2 magnitude galaxy as a GOTO/reference object!!
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