Tŷ Du Observatory

At around 17:45 today I was lucky enough to see the clouds break and Venus pop out from behind the Moon. I managed to get a few photos before rushing out, but considering problems I’ve had with focusing the Fuji S9500 in the past I think they’re not too bad.

The image on the left was taken using “night-time” mode, which is an automatic 4 second exposure. The image on the right was a simple point and click in auto-mode.  Both images were taken with the camera on a tripod and a 2 second delay between click and image to prevent camera movement caused by my big fingers.

Levels and Curves tweaked using the Gimp.

Finally I find myself between two weather fronts, after more than 2 weeks of non-stop rain I’ve had a couple of hours of almost clear sky this evening.  High cloud and a steamed up CCD cover made faint fuzzies too difficult although I did manage a few frames early on. As the clouds gathered I packed away the Atik 16ic and fetched my new un-modded SPC900NC. With the addition of a 3x barlow I turned the scope to Mars.

So here are 2 firsts for me, NGC6946 which is a magnitude 10.5 galaxy in Cepheus taken with the Atic 16ic. It’s a stack of 8×20 second frames stacked and stretched in K3CCDTools. The clouds may have parted but between the breeze and my not so good tracking most frames were unusable.

My next “first” is the red planet. Previously I’ve viewed Mars through an eyepiece with a 2x barlow and barely been able to make out any surface detail, but tonight after a quick laser/barlow collimation and some lucky focusing I’ve managed a half decent image (IMHO).