I sat down tonight to relax after a long week. This is my busy season and finding time for astronomy is getting more difficult. So I thought I'd watch a movie. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go out and play with the scope. The truth is that one of the primary reasons that I enjoy astronomy is that it brings peace to my soul. I suppose you could say it's my way of escaping from the daily pressures. Sitting in the cool night air inside the little dome, I almost find myself transported to another place.
Tonight was not as quiet as some others, since my observing was between 8:00 and 9:30 local time. On a Friday night, that means there is a lot of activity in the neighborhood. Plus it was breezy and someone nearby was burning their fireplace - and whatever they were burning didn't smell too good. Even so, I had a great time as usual.
I decided to play with the CCD camera a bit. Started out with Betelgeuse, a truly red giant. I put the filter wheel to the visual spectrum filter and shot a few images - unfortunately I was not paying attention to the program settings so they were saved to the wrong place. I'll have to spend a few minutes searching for the pics tomorrow. I think that I got some fairly decent, although low resolution, spectra. If so it will be a fun exercise to identify the prominent spectral lines.
I was disappointed to find my wireless focuser system was not hooking properly to the USB port, so I had to manual focus. With the short time I did not get the focus too perfect.
I then slewed over to Saturn but I was not able to get an image that did not appear over-exposed, no matter how short I set the shutter speed.
Since time was short - family obligations prevented this from being a very long observing night - I decided to shoot an easy target. I slewed to M42, the Orion Nebula, to see what I could get. The image above is a composite of just a few 4-5 second images through R, G, and B filters - no attempt was made to get a true color shot. It's way overexposed in the center, where the Trapezium is, but since I'm at the bottom of the learning curve with Photoshop, fixing that will be a project for another day. I suspect there is actually a much better picture in the original fits files, but they need to be processed better.
Which brings me back to the start, in that my objective is really just to have a lot of fun, not to do a lot of work. Thus my slow and gradual photo progress, I guess I really don't care much if my pics are not a high quality yet. The main thing is that it's a whole lot of fun to get out, breath the (usually) fresh air, and immerse myself in the quiet of the night, instead of sitting in front of the t.v.!
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