Jupiter – 4th January 2013

Date

Wow, another clear(ish) night forecast.  I took the opportunity this evening to give the scope collimation a tweak, but I found that the seeing wasn’t great at all, with some high level moisture causing a few problems.

I used the nearby Red Giant α Tauri (Alderbaran) to carry out thefinal collimation tweak.  I used, for the first time, the defocused star real-time collimation routine in CCD Inspector to aid with the routine, though a little cumbersome with the DMK camera, I reached a point of “perfect” collimation after about 30 mins of effort.

buoyed with this success, I used the Bahtinov Grabber routine developed by Niels Noordhoek (Can be found here) to assist in precise focusing.  Once again, I found this a little more difficult using the DMK probably down the sensitivity, but the software reported the Bahtinov shape in the critical focus zone.
IDL TIFF file

Imaged using an IS DMK camera through a Meade 12″ LX200R at native f10.  Stacked using AVIStack2, the image is 350 from 2000 frams taken at 30fps.  A little blurry still, but I think this was down to atmospherics rather than collimation this time.

Thanks for looking

Steve

 

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