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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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« The Moon and Jupiter this morning 19th November 2014 | Main | The Sky this morning - 17th November 2014 »
Tuesday
Nov182014

NGC 2477 Cluster Project

The Moon is still on the wane and I imaged it this morning with my Sony Alpha 350 and telephoto lens - a quick handheld snap.

 

Here is yesterday's image for comparison

 Yesterday I used the T30 telescope at Siding Spring to take 4 images of NGC 2477 also known as M71. I am trying to produce a meaningful HR Diagram of this cluster so that I can estimate its age to see how closely I can get it to the currently accepted value of 700 million years. (SEDS)

I took B and V images at 60 second and 120 second exposures to try and ascertain the optimum exposure. I had previously taken a V image of the cluster with a 300 second exposure and many of the brighter stars were saturated - meaning that I can not measure their V magnitude. 

To be continued.