DON’T TRUST THAT CLEAR SKY CLOCK

It’s not Mr. Danko’s fault the CSC is misleading half the time… weather is hard to predict. Tuesday night the CSC predicted clear skies and good seeing from 8 pm on… alas, it didn’t work that way. I left a dinner engagement in time to be home at 8 pm… cloudy. Had to pass on observing with Steve K…. cloudy. The sky finally cleared at 2 a.m.

Transparency was excellent! I checked on a few variable stars with big binoculars… R Leonis stood out naked eye bright like a cherry in the sky. Saturn had passed the meridian and was out of reach for my 11″, but I set up a little GT80 refractor with the Rebel piggy-back to take some images of the sky. I tried a 135mm telephoto and then switched to imaging through the scope (using a barlow lens and diagonal). Clouds badgered my efforts. The seeing was poor but I managed a few images, and here is one of M-3, a globular near Arcturus:

Now, you may wonder why the centre of the image is so bright. That’s what happens when you obtain focus in a small telescope using a 1.25″ barlow lens in a 1.25″ diagonal! Lesson: use a 2″ setup on reflector so you can see the camera screen when shooting. That, and once achieving good focus, take a large number of shots for stacking purposes, to eliminate noise.