Friday Night Lights — Loran Hughes Astrophotography

After a week of partial overcast and a couple of thunderstorms, Friday night shaped up quite nicely for some time with the telescope. I'd already swapped out the 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain scope for the 6-inch. I also took some time to re-align my polar alignment scope. As it turned out, that made all the difference in the world.

I ran into some problems early on though - the laptop would lose connection to the telescope mount as I was getting it aligned for the evening. The first time, I thought it was a fluke. It turned out to be the USB hub. Things just don't seem to play well through that USB 3.1 connection. I've got a USB 3.0 hub on order to replace it.

Once I plugged the mount directly into the laptop and aligned the scope (for the third time!), I got good focus by using a Bahtinov mask.

Diffraction spikes are centered on Arcturus, indicated good focus.

After I got the alignment and focus taken care of, I grabbed a quick shot of the moon. It was about 77% illuminated, so why not?

The smaller scope fitted with a focal reducer gave me a much greater field of view. I contemplated making a nice mosaic of the moon, but decided I didn't want to spend the whole evening doing that. Maybe some other time.

Since Jupiter was in the vicinity, I got a nice view of the Jovian system. This time I decided to make a composite image of the planet with its moons. You have to ramp up the camera gain to see the moons, but doing that makes Jupiter a big ball of white light. When you bring the gain down to see the cloud bands, the moons disappear. Stitching two photos together fixes that problem.

Jovian System. Giant labels not included.

Next, I succeeded in getting a somewhat better photo of the Hercules Globular Cluster, M13. This time, I was able to get a six minute, 20 second exposure by taking short, 20 second exposures and stacking them. I planned to let this go for about an hour, but the stacking process stopped early while I wasn't paying attention. It turned out that the camera's power cable snagged, preventing the mount from tracking properly. It was much better than my first attempt a few weeks ago, so I'm putting that in my success column.

This image puts my first attempt at M13 to shame:

Next time, I'll pick a target and stick with it. But it had been a while since I'd been out, so I was like a kid in a candy store. Things were working well and I was having fun, which is the most important aspect of all this.