Utah Astrophotography
Andromeda
Decided to bust out the old telescope last night and do some deep space imaging, been a while since I used it and my bigger mount. Of course I'm on call at work which means I can't travel far, have to stay within cell range and be able to get in to work within an hour. So I headed up to my fallback shooting location, Rockport Reservoir. Got up there, spent an hour setting everything up, went to start up my tablet and begin alignment and then I noticed...I was missing the bluetooth dongle for my wireless keyboard and mouse. The stupid tablet touchscreen keyboard won't allow you to use specific key commands in combination, commands I need to do the alignment and get my target in the field of view. So I spent another hour looking for the dongle, realizing it wasn't going to be found, and trying everything I knew to get the alignment to work. No dice, almost decided to pack it up, but instead I did the sharpcap polar alignment and decided to give doing a fully manual mount alignment using a laser pointer. Chose Andromeda because I could actually see it, used the laser pointer and nailed the alignment first try. I just laughed when the first image popped up on the tablet.
I wasted so much time with all that crap so I only got about 100 minutes worth of data. This is stack of 16 exposures, each 7 minutes at ISO 800 with my Nikon D7000 and Astrotech AT65EDQ on a Sirius EQ-G tracking mount. Not the best, but given all the crap I had to go through to get it....I'll take it.
Andromeda
Decided to bust out the old telescope last night and do some deep space imaging, been a while since I used it and my bigger mount. Of course I'm on call at work which means I can't travel far, have to stay within cell range and be able to get in to work within an hour. So I headed up to my fallback shooting location, Rockport Reservoir. Got up there, spent an hour setting everything up, went to start up my tablet and begin alignment and then I noticed...I was missing the bluetooth dongle for my wireless keyboard and mouse. The stupid tablet touchscreen keyboard won't allow you to use specific key commands in combination, commands I need to do the alignment and get my target in the field of view. So I spent another hour looking for the dongle, realizing it wasn't going to be found, and trying everything I knew to get the alignment to work. No dice, almost decided to pack it up, but instead I did the sharpcap polar alignment and decided to give doing a fully manual mount alignment using a laser pointer. Chose Andromeda because I could actually see it, used the laser pointer and nailed the alignment first try. I just laughed when the first image popped up on the tablet.
I wasted so much time with all that crap so I only got about 100 minutes worth of data. This is stack of 16 exposures, each 7 minutes at ISO 800 with my Nikon D7000 and Astrotech AT65EDQ on a Sirius EQ-G tracking mount. Not the best, but given all the crap I had to go through to get it....I'll take it.