Who said astronomy isn't exciting?

[MattJenko]

Pretty entertaining couple of hours in Essex.

Trains from London knackered due to a flash flood in Manor Park, resulting in a sweaty, lengthy crawl through puddles home. A bit of a race against the clock as I have a newly arrived second hand astromodded Canon 450D burning a hole on my desk just itching, itching, itching to get a first light and the forecast involves weather warnings, but clear early on. Finally got home and rushed to get the kit outside. Set up the HEQ5 in pretty quick time and went for a handset polar alignment calibration on top of the usual polar aligning which I messed up when I tried before. The lightening started to flash over Colchester a couple of miles away, but the skies immediately above me remained clear, apart from clouds of daddy long legs which are everywhere at the moment.

Got aligned although the synscan polar alignment still seems odd to me, and got the camera attached and started getting focussed on Vega, using a bahtinov mask. I have a MacBookPro, so am limited to controlling the 450D via the EOD utility. There was no need for torches with the regular lightening flashes. With the focus all set, I wanted to have a go at the Coat Hanger asterism, as this was near Vega and away from the closing in cloud. I had a few sips of a marvellous black russian and tried to get the framing right. The handset only has NGC 6802, which is at one end. I couldn't easily get it in shot and in a burst of exuberance, sent the whole asterism out of shot, in a completely unknown direction. In technical hope rather than expectation, I plugged the MacbookPro to the handset and lo and behold if I didn't nearly spill my drink. A lovely little circle labelled HEQ5 appeared just to the west of the coat hanger in Stellarium. I selected 4 Vul and hit slew and wouldn't you know, off went the mount. God bless rainy days and the fiddling I have been up to.

I set up a quick 5 x 40sec plan in the EOS utility and kicked it off, but the clouds were relentless and the thunder louder. I managed 1 shot before the cloud swamped the skies and and the rapid retreat back under shelter began.

The resulting single sub, partially processed, semi trailing image doesn't look much and won't make Astro Picture Of the Day, but for me this is one of the best images I have taken so far as it involved so much, entertainment included.

[Steve Ward]

It's a lovely feeling when that first image appears out of the darkness , looking forward to seeing more .... 

That storm also flooded one of the tunnels on the A12 , took me 3-1/2 hours to get from the Royal Greenwich Observatory to the bottom of the M11 ... 

[ollypenrice]

Anybody who doesn't find astronomy exciting should go back to watching whatever it was they were watching before they stopped watching TV and tried astronomy. Spice Girls videos, maybe?

Oh, that first view of M42 with a CCD camera.... I can see it now and it was a moment shared with a guest. It made us blood brothers!

 lly

[uhb1966]

That sub reminds me ofmy last m31 try >_<