Jupiter 2020sept20
Another night of imaging with the Meade 102mm SC on the Meade LXD55 equatorial mount in the Serenity Observatory. Started with realigning by hand the OTA on the dovetail, as it had slipped. Need to take it off and tighten that single point of attachment sometime, but not last night and not just before a session.
Powered up the mount, told it to do a two star alignment, using Arcturus and Mizar. Used the new two holer Hartmann mask to focus on Mizar and low and behold, resolved the double star and it was quite sharp. The Hartmann mask came off and told it to go to Jupiter, and it did get close, within the 1/2 degree of the innermost Telrad circle. Found it. Added the dew shield and started imaging runs, two 30sec first then 180second runs. The seeing appeared average but the transparency poor. I was not happy with the ongoing image, so after 3 runs, fiddled with the focus. It got worse 🙁
While processing the images I noticed the Great Red Spot… on the wrong hemisphere. I then remembered that for some reason the equatorially mounted scope, after the 2 star align, went to Jupiter and was upside down from its normal orientation. Wonder why that happened? So in Irfanview, I rotated the image 180 degrees and all was good again.
But on the other hand, updated images of the scope and observatory are annotating well. Still no successful imaging of Mars yet…
Below is an animated compilation of all 6 or 7 imaging runs:
Todo: resecure the OTA to the Dovetail, lower the tripod slightly as its new height is touching the closed roof.