Last night I was tricked and as a result missed out on the treat. Halloween's a few days away but it got me early!
I spent a couple of hours packing up the truck with telescope gear for an observing session at a dark site with several friends. Comet Swan (C/2006 M4) has brightened up and is putting on a good show, so I planned to arrive early enough to set up two scopes and be ready to start imaging as soon as darkness arrived. The plan was to take images as well as to obtain a spectrum of the comet, and after it set to have a great all-nighter viewing and imaging other objects, and hanging out with my buddies.
As soon as I left, I discovered that the Southern sky was clouded over. I talked to Alfredo on the phone (he was already there) and we decided that it was probably going to cloud over, so I turned around and came home. A quick look at the weather satellite page showed a nasty mess of clouds down there.
Trick! It turned out to be a clear night after all. Unfortunately it was too late to get down in time to see the comet by the time I realized that, plus I had already made other plans (to go buy a new dishwasher...) So I missed out on what probably would have been a great night.
I left the truck packed up though, so it is possible I will get out tonight instead if the clouds stay away.
Later in the evening I did open up Xanadu though. I've been playing with getting the RCX set up and finally hooked in the CCD for a few test shots. There is still some work to be done before I'll be able to produce quality images from the system, but I was able to get a start on determining some of the settings. This image is M77, a spiral galaxy, it's a combination of 9 x 2 minute exposures through a UV/IR blocked luminance filter. One thing I need to resolve is the focussing and this image is slightly out of focus. Also I did not flat-field it.
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