Last night was first light at CPO! It was more of a challenge than I anticipated. When I installed and leveled the scope, I aligned the mount using both the compass in the mount and a digital compass. The magnetic declination offset for Indiana is zero, so I thought I would at least be close to the pole star when I attempted polar alignment. Fat chance! I was so far off, I had to rotate the mount about 15 degrees, throwing off my leveling. However, I finally got the mount level and polar aligned using a reticle eyepiece. My first slew to Arcturus for one-star alignment was not even in the FOV of the finder, but I manually centered the star and synched. My first GOTO object was M13--an easy choice. It was close to the center of the finder, but just outside the FOV of the scope with a 25mm eyepiece--I may have to realign the scope again (there are times when I am truly tempted to go back to ALT/AZ--lol).
I fired up the Xtreme + MFR-5, set the gain to 4 and took 3 images of M13 with exposures of 3,6,and 9 seconds. The results are interesting. The 3-second exposure shows a significant amount of color. The 9-second exposure shows little color. The core of the cluster is starting to "blow out," but more halo stars are visible.
As it does not get dark enough to align a scope until around 9:30 pm here, it was around 11:00 pm by the time I captured these images and I decided to pack up at that point as I had to work today. It's been about 6 months since the POD was delivered and it's good to have the observatory up and running at last!
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| 3-Second Exposure |
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| 6-Second Exposure |
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| 9-Second Exposure |
2nd try. Great pics. Very helpful re Mallincam possibilities. Congrats on first light! ��My POD came Feb (?) Sat all winter &still needs final caulking before I move stuff in. Just lurking POD group so far as install OK so far. Any thoughts /ideas on Mallincam much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteDan in NW IN.
daneldf@gmail.com
Hi, Dan! Thank you for the kind words. I am very enthusiastic about Mallincam. Video astronomy is very different from CCD imaging. The resolution is lower, but the sensitivity is way higher. The result is that you get stunning color images of DSOs with just a few seconds of exposure--all the preliminary image processing is handled by the camera in real time. If you get a hand-controlled version of a camera, you don't even need a PC to get these images. Some Mallincammers sit in their living rooms, remotely controlling their scopes and enjoying the view in their TVs. The clincher is the excellent support provided by Rock Mallin (and Jack). They both really go out of their way to make sure customers were happy. When a third party screwed up an order, Rock sent me his top of the line focal reducer free as an apology--and the error was not even his fault. Damaged cams are usually fixed at no charge. In my book, you can't beat that.
DeleteGood luck with the POD--you will love it!