9-21-2007 First "real" DSI try

Camping up at Sheridan Lake again, but this time decided to drive to the main parking lot to set up. Before dusk, got everything situated. Moon was the first target!

Before we start, I have to mention that I did receive my:

• Piggy back mount--installed but then I couldn't use my finder, and the camera isn't a good finder IMO, so it promptly came back off. Maybe there is a sol'n to this?



• F/6.3 Focal Reducer-installed



• DC adapter so I don't have to use my inverter (still running things off of my truck)

This makes things a little easier and now I feel better suited to the moon and DSO's. Trust me, the FOV on an 8" f10 is not big enough for DSO....advice that is on the forums but easy to dismiss until you try. Even with this reducer, the larger nebulae and galaxies like M31 are not possible in one picture.

First target: Loony Luna

I couldn't get the GOTO to work even when successfully aligned. This was an annoyance since I didn't want to manually track things. Oh well, I tried 5 times before finally giving up.

I focused on the moon with the DSI, auto exposed, and pressed start. Below is a photo of 7 stacked photos. I downloaded Registax and just loaded the photos, picked 3 features with the box, clicked align, and then went into PS7 to adjust the contrast, unsharp mask, and brightness. I really need to learn the processing steps, because I know from what I've seen at http://www.cloudynights.com/ that my images have more than enough info to get great astrographs. Here is my resultant moon--picture is as appears in telescope.

This above photo is the aligned photos in Registax, and the below is after PS7 adjustments

This actually feels like a decent first try! I'm quite happy with the moon although I have no processing skills, feel I brought out at least some detail.

Next up: The jovial Jovian wonder

For this, every time I pressed autoexpose, all I got was a flashing blob that was tiny on my screen. I wanted to capture the moons with Jupiter though, and to do that meant overexposing the tar out of it. The problem is once I had my overexposed Jupiter and moons, even with lowering the exposure time I was unable to get a Jupiter that even showed a band. 2 were very visible through the eyepiece. The result is below.

We have a start at least, and have learned some valuable lessons.

Notes:

I could really use a 5x telextender especially with my focal reducer

I should have used my 2x barlow while imaging Jupiter....never occured to me

Processing these photos is black magic, and I usually overdo it and have to start over, or make no progress. I have a bunch of links that I am going to examine that are supposed to be processing tutorials. Maybe I'll learn something??