Joe

I looked for your jupiter moon shot but didn't see it. I will look again in a bit.

 

Dave Bennett

I love the animation gif file you posted of the moons of Jupiter rotating around. Good job!

http://www.utahastronomy.com/album12

 

Jim

Joe Bauman <bau@desnews.com> wrote:

Hi All, A quick report on my excursion to the Wedge Friday night. I
drove around searching for Kim and the Grahns, but couldn't find them
when I was looking. I did come across Kim's sister and her family and
she thought they would be around somewhere. I looked again but
couldn't find them. So I set up not far from his sister's family.
Shortly afterward, Kim walked over -- he and his family and the
Grahns had been camping in an area I had not checked. By then I had
my 'scope up in Polar mode and it was too heavy to take down and move
again, so I decided to stay there. But I walked over to their camp
and I was able to meet some really nice folks.

Back at my camp, my trouble was just beginning. A huge dark cloud
mass obscured much of the sky, including the Big Dipper and Polaris,
making it impossible for me to make my final checks. So I just went
ahead and pretended I could see Polaris, and did the other
alignments. It turned out that, because I had used a compass (propery
offset) to set up, I was close to the correct setting.

After the clouds cleared the night was glorious, with nice, steady
viewing. But my main goal was to take photos, and I tried to get my
Meade LPI system to track a start so I could make a long exposure.
That was impossible. I succeeded in getting the LPI camer and a 26-mm
lens to be parafocal to each other, but I couldn't get a star to show
up that I could track with. I suspect the parafocus wasn't point on
so the star images weren't sharp enough to show up. I will need to
work on that some more.

This took most of the night. But I managed to get a glimpse of M-51,
which was extraordinary, and the stars around it were especially
bright. Also the Orion Nebula was bright, early in the evening.

I gave up on using the LPI as an autoguider and decided to take some
Jupiter pictures with it. I didn't spend much time or effort on this,
as the image began to blur and bobble around, I suspect because
predawn high-level breezes were snorting through. But a couple were
surprising to me, in the amount of detail they show. I have posted
two of them to my gallery (see the link at the very bottom of this
note). So the night was sort of a failure and sort of successful.
Best wishes, Joe

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