Beautiful weather and the promise of clear skies, it’s been sunny all day and I checked the forecast for the evening and it’s to be clear with temperatures in the low 60s.  The sky is a beautiful shade of blue, no haze.  The temperature is 74 degrees and the humidity is 53%.  I don’t normally have the time to get out during the week but with such a lovely day and it being the autumnal equinox I made the time.  Sunset is at 19:04 with moonrise at 20:19. The moon is waning gibbous with illumination between 95.8% and 93.3%. I started initial setup around 1515 by getting all three finder scopes mounted and easily adjustable. Now I just have to wait until work is over so I can take my phone out and use it for rough alignment.

I ordered a new dovetail today to replace the stock one that came with my ED80, it’s the Orion wide universal.  I also ordered various nuts and bolts so I can mount the mini-PC to a rail of my own design.  My nephew is off to Harbor Freight to pick up a power drill and a c-clamp for me.  Once the dovetail arrives, I’ll get some aluminum stock and drill various holes precisely placed so I can mount the PC along with other devices mounting the rail using the tube rings’ ¼ 20-inch mount points.  I’ve never been much of a DIY with anything other than building PCs so this will be a truly new experience for me.

I also made some configuration changes to the mini-PC.  I can now connect wirelessly to it from within the house as it now has the ability to create its own access point.

I do hope to get some type of imaging done tonight, perhaps the Moon will be so kind as to grant me permission to take a few of her.  I’m going to start with the following equipment and settings.  Equipment being used is my ED80 APO F7/5 and my Canon 600D in prime focus.  I’ll start with ISO setting 100 and exposure setting of 1/400 and see where that takes me. Hopefully tracking will be good for me tonight so I can try and experiment with different ISO settings and longer exposures 

Rough Polar Alignment started at 17:10, completed at 17:30. I went out at sundown and enjoyed the evening air until darkness.  I then spent the next couple of hours trying to accomplish an alignment using SynScan’s 1 Star process and Jupiter as the star, never got a good alignment after multiple attempts.  I’d start the alignment and the Go To function would get close to Jupiter, I’d then use the RA and Dec adjustment knobs on the mount to center Jupiter in the cross hairs of the reticle, boy what a pain that was.  I ended up doing that so many times I lost count of how many attempts I made.  No matter how many times I did it, Jupiter would drift.  I would track over to another star and there would be nothing in the EP.  I’d then Go To back to Jupiter and it would be almost where it started at.  I will figure out what I’m doing wrong, it was just extremely frustrating.  At least until I hooked up the Canon and started taking moon shots.  I did get an alignment good enough to take quite a few shots of the Moon once she came up, alignment isn’t quite so critical with the Moon and I wasn’t taking super long exposures. I learned I need extension tubes to achieve prime focus with the Canon connected directly to the OTA. I’ll process them tomorrow and see what I can see.

Clear Skies!