clear sky chart

Job 9:9

Job 9:9-10
9 He is the Maker of the Bear and Orion,
the Pleiades and the constellations of the south.
10 He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed,
miracles that cannot be counted.
NIV

Monday, December 26, 2011

Collimating on the Fly

Took the scope out to look at Venus, and what I saw was a horrible blob of light.  I de-focused and the defocused fuzz was chopped on one side.  I ended up moving the secondary towards the open end of the tube and re-aligned both mirrors.  By the time I got it aligned again, Venus was too low in the sky, so I turned to Jupiter.

Played with the alignment.  Its still wasnt perfect - the secondary is still too far back towards the primary, but it is better than it was.  Recentered the primary and shot some images of Jupiter.  They were average, nothing spectacular.  I had the hair brained idea to try the 3X barlow (3600mm f/l).  The image of Jupiter with the new gears on the Ponset was not moving - at all.  The image with the 3X was large and stayed pretty steady on the CCD.  I fired off an avi of 1200 frames, which I used them all in this image:

I cropped to 320X240.  The images with the 2X werent even close to this level of detail.  I'm curious what it'll do once I get the scope re-adjusted to where it should be, as the old 2X barlow were giving pretty good views up till recently.

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