Mars 2020nov04
Mars on Wednesday evening during the weekly social chat videoconference. Now that we are on Standard Time, it is a little easier to get outside and image in the evening.…
Mars 2020Nov01
After the last session on Oct30, I thought there were dust spots on the camera sensor window glass, so this was cleaned. I wanted to test it but there were…
Mars 2020Oct30
A good clear night, the first in a long time, albeit a little cold. Mars is now up high fairly early on in the evening, so we went out and…
Mars 2020Oct21
Mars Wednesday evening. It was unexpectedly somewhat clear, at least in the direction of Mars, last night. A lot of cloud all around, affecting other imagers to some degree. This…
Mars 2020 Oct 17
This is one of only two imaging runs of Mars on Friday evening. Another long day and a short night… not enough sleep hours in a day After completing the…
Jupiter double shadow transit 2020oct17
Shadow transits of Moons of Jupiter on Jupiter are relatively common. Double shadow transits are somewhat less common. Seen here is the moon Io off to the right with two…
Astronomy image processing
The current desktop computer that processes all of our astronomy images is nine years old. It’s specs are: Intelcore 2 Duo E7400 @ 2.8GHz, 4GB DDR2, 120GB SSD, DVD, Win10Pro64bit,…
Mars 2020 Oct 10 and 11
There were great plans afoot to image the planets this long weekend: Friday Saturday and Sunday evenings. Friday evening, the observatory was opened, the scope cooled down, and were just…
How much does the roof weigh?
The original metal roof of the SCGO observatory has blown off twice in very high winds, once by the remnants of a hurricane and the other by a blizzard. It…
Mars 2020sept25
Finally! After two years since the last opposition of Mars, I had a great night of imaging it. I had previously done a few back in June but Mars was…
Jupiter 2020sept18
After building a new hartman mask, a new dew shield, a new tripod prop, I did a two star alignment on Arcturus and Altair then went to Jupiter as it…
Jupiter 2020 Sept 23
1st quarter moon was maybe 35 degrees away from Jupiter, the southern half of the sky was lit up by the moon with high haze. Pointing the mount, big failure…
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…
SCGO Headlamp Review
Headlamps are a wonderful invention. From harvesting veg after sunset to working in the dark with astronomy. One requires white light and the other requires red light. White light makes…
Jupiter 2020sept11
Friday evening was the first nice clear skies in over a week. So we were out observing and imaging. by 9pm the temp had dropped to 6.6C, below the predicted…