My Astronomy

 

 

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My Telescopes

My Main Telescope - C14 and Paramount ME

My new Paramount MyT and 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien Telescope

MyT Hand Controller

My Meade 12 inch SCT on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

My 4 inch Meade Refractor with Sky Watcher Guidescope and ZWO camera on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Mount with Canon 40D

 

My Solar setup using a DSLR and Mylar Filter on my ETX90

DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

Astronomy Blog Index
About the Site

 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

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« Day 55 Hot day and hot under the collar with my old MX916. | Main | Day 53 - Bright Jupiter surrounded by invisible comets. »
Sunday
Apr062014

Day 54 Setting up my old MX916 camera.

A clear night with the Moon at a 46% phase to the South West.

I set up my ETX90 plus my old MX916 CCD Camera. My aim is to mount this onto the 4 inch refractor on the CGEM and use it for spectroscopy. The MX916 was connected in line to the ETX with a 32mm eyepiece in the right angle position to use with the flip mirror. As it was just getting dark I used the finderscope to align the ETX on the bright street lights down towards Garrucha. I then centralised a light in the eyepiece and then flipped the mirror to use the CCD camera. I adjusted the focusing to bring the street light in focus. When it was dark I went throught he same process using Mizar as the target. I was able to focus the CCD camera fairy easily. I used CCDSoft (which I had set up on my netbook pc (uns and eventually runs out so the programme crashes. The software for the camera seems not to run on anything later than XP so I cannot use my laptop.

This is Sky and Telescope's Sky Week. No eclipse for us in Europe though!