Friday night’s public session was a real hit! About 20 people showed up to look through their own scopes or our members’. There was a mixture of singles, couples and whole families. Some were returnees from previous star parties. Many are planning to join us next weekend too, when the moon will not intrude on some serious deep sky observing, during our first back-to-back public sessions. It was perfectly clear all night, no wind. Even the Milky Way was faintly visible under the huge gibbous moon. Temps were in the 60s at first, and quickly gave way to the mid […]
Observation Report
8 posts
August 4th-5th, 2021. A warm, dry, windless, mostly clear night in Dewitt, NY. Saturn is at opposition with Jupiter not far behind. My driveway suffers with Bortle 9, and seeing was meh, but no dew, yay! Once again, Sharpcap did it’s magic with deft and aplomb. I tested 4 different settings in an effort to increase the frames/second during movies of the gas giants. The best ones are below. The one of Jupiter was shot at nearly 80fps and wow, what a difference in clarity and color of the GRS and moons. This is also my first attempt at using […]
Here’s what I can capture, produce and show at my next Public Moon Night. IMHO, they’re almost as good as the Cave, perhaps a bit better. It was actually first light, visually, through my EAA scope. For the past 2 months,it has been camera-only. Even with an 92% lit moon, the planets had lots of detail with the 8″ EdgeHD at prime focus (no reducer, no Barlow) and planetary ZWO ASI462 camera attached. I used SharpCap to capture movies of the Moon and FireCapture for the planets. The planets were an amazing 3 inches across on the TV…great for public […]
Observation Notes: July 4-5, 2021 Darling Hill Observatory, Vesper NY. Temperature cooled quickly from 70 – 54 degrees, no wind, great seeing, early heavy dew, nearly cloudless, no moon until a 3AM waning crescent. Plenty of fireworks heard but no light issues, lovely Milky Way arching directly overhead. After a 3.5 hr delay due to technical problems and user errors, I finally got everything working right. I used some old darks in pre-processing that blocked nearly everything out and saw nothing but medium brightness stars. I won’t do that again. Thankfully, I had cranked up the heat early on my […]