Pleiades, Hyades and Lovejoy

[baggywrinkle]

It was too windy at Seething (NAS observatory site) last night, The image in the scope was just bouncing all over the place, so I just went for widefield.

Here is one shot I took 20 secs at ISO1600 with a 28mm lens. I need to really use DSS on some other images I took.

[baggywrinkle]

Sorry about the image quality, it is not how it looks on the original.

[Davey-T]

Looks OK to me, make a nice picture by the weekend it should be near the Pleiades.

Dave

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice wide-field shot.

[baggywrinkle]

Also the first time I have been able to observe a comet in my ED80. I was well pleased as there was some good contrast and the colour was a lovely green.....

There must have been 6+ scopes on the ads at Seething last night plus it was an open evening so a of visitors. I looked at Lovejoy in a number of OTA's, a 90mm Takahashi and a 10'' SW Dob a 12'' dob too.

Seething is a good dark site and we were able to just able to make out Lovejoy with the naked eye.

[Pete Presland]

Very nice widefield view!

[xs2man]

I love these widefield shots.  I really need to get taking more pics.

[baggywrinkle]

The great thing about widefield is that it can be done quickly and at almost any time the clouds break in a decent manner.

The wind was very gusty on Saturday night and I did attach my camera to the ED80 but I was using my iOptron Smart EQ mount which under mormal operation is OK, but with the gusty wind we had I could not get stability or focus.

It was after I attached the camera to the ED80 that a big gust blew and litteraly blew my scope case of the bench onto the observing pad, the 2'' diagonal and ep got ejected, and the 2'' thread end of the diagonal is now less than round. I can still see OK through it but it looks a tad sad now.

The wind was not too much of an issue when I mounted the camera on the tripod, I do have a nano-tracker but by 8pm I was getting colder and colder and decided to call it a night.