Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. As is typical for the Pacific Northwest, it's wet and overcast, which unfortunately makes viewing the heavens difficult. It's especially hard when Santa brings lots of astronomical goodies that can't be used until the sun decides to return. Santa was very good to me this year, bringing everything I need to start doing long-exposure astrophotography, including a Celestron HD Pro wedge, a Nexguide autoguider, and a few other things. Here's hoping for clear skies soon!


By Beverly & Pack

Table Mountain Star Party 2010

Here are a few pictures from the 2010 Table Mountain Star Party:

From TMSP 2010 - Site Photos

Table Mountain

With a new moon and clear skies forecast for last weekend, Tony and I decided to head up to Table Mountain for an evening of observing and astrophotography. We loaded up my truck and headed out at 3:00 PM on Saturday. On arrival we discovered that the road was still blocked by snow about a mile from the summit, and in fact there was someone stuck in the snow that we helped tow out (I have a 4X4). I didn't think we'd make it to the top, so we set up in a big meadow right before the snow line.

After unloading the truck and setting up camp and the telescope, we cooked a fine dinner of cowboy beans and waited for the sun to set. As we waited, a few other observers arrived and set their gear up. Venus was the first to appear in the cloudless, dark sky.

Here's Tony relaxing and waiting for dark (click to enlarge):

We spent a couple of hours looking at various targets including M13, M31, M57, Saturn, Venus, Mars, and several others. Around midnight Tony got tired and crawled into his tent to sleep, and I broke out the Nikon to start taking pictures.

My first target was M57. I recently purchases a Bhatinov mask to help with focusing, and it REALLY helped. I was able to get pinpoint focus within just a couple of minutes. I started snapping 30-second shots of M57, and then realized I had left the focusing mask on :). After correcting that little problem, I proceeded to take about 30 exposures.

I then imaged M31, NGC6703, and NGC6946. After that I took the camera off the 'scope and tried taking a few wide-angle shots. I wrapped up at around 2:00 AM and went to bed.
The next morning we packed up and headed home, where I downloaded the data I had capture and started processing. Unfortunately the only shots that came out well were the ones of M57:

Here's M31. As I said, not very good:

Here's a shot of my telescope and camp site taken just after sunset (click to enlarge):

Overall it was a great trip. I really need to get a wedge and autoguiding setup to I can take longer exposures.