03/02/2008 First Light for the Epsilon

No, I have not disappeared into a black hole...it's hard to believe how rapidly time can go by. Seems like only yesterday that I last posted a blog, and here it is March already.
I must admit, however, that I have not been as active with astronomy these past few months as I wish I had been. I've had a few imaging sessions, but the data sits unprocessed on the hard drive. Our local club has been pursuing acquisition of a new dark site, and since I'm on the Board, I've been somewhat involved with that. I've been getting ready to teach the Astronomy Merit Badge to my son's Boy Scout troop. And I've spent a lot of time working on the roll-off roof observatory that will eventually allow me to do even more astronomy from my back yard. But I've missed quite a few clear observing nights, and obviously I have been bad about posting to my blog.
There have been a few equipment plans in the works. One was an intended acquisition of a Paramount equatorial mount, but that was cancelled for a variety of reasons, primary among them that Software Bisque could not seem to deliver it. So now my name is on the waiting list for an AstroPhysics mount, which will take quite a while to get.
Meanwhile I made a deal with my friend Dean and ended up with his Takahashi Epsilon 180. He's imaged just about everything possible and needed to move to a longer focal length, so we worked out a trade and now I'm the proud owner of this scope. It's a lot for the CGE mount to handle, and I'll be interested to see whether I can get decent images out of it without a larger mount. I needed to add a second 25# counterweight because it is much heavier than the refractor. Tonight I got it all set up and balanced, and as I type this I'm running "V-Curves" in FocusMax to get a good profile for automated focussing. So far it's looking pretty good.
I know I won't be able to produce the quality of images that Dean has - many of them have been published in the magazines, including several pages worth in Sky & Telescope's "Beautiful Universe" book and the inside back page of numerous issues of Astronomy Magazine, including the latest issue. But hopefully I'll have some fun with it, that's what it's all about!