First light with EEA setup, first quasars seen..

[cathalferris]

Tuesday night was my first light with near-complete video setup.  

I picked up my new-to-me Celestron C6N ota on Monday morning, spent part of the day collimating and cleaning and tweaking and fixing that OTA. Surprisingly, Tuesday night last was clear enough for long enough that I could take out my EAA setup with that 6" Newt on my new AVX mount, with the SkyFi box giving me wireless control with my cheapie Amazon Fire 7 tablet running SkySafari Pro, and the SCB-4000 camera outputting to a 3" reversing screen. I'm running all of these from a medium sized spare car battery I have lying around.

Well, I'm pretty amazed. My sky conditions allow me to use the 512x sense-up level, AGC/DNR/AGC Colour all as high. M42 was amazing, full of reds and blues, just like the pictures in the books. The Running Man was nicely visible. Tried for the Horsehead, and I could *just barely* make out the border between the dust cloud and the Ha emission behind it - really hard to see on the little screen. Comet Catalina was present, and I got my first view of that in over 2 months.I went for a slew through galaxies from UMa through to Virgo, enjoying seeing the Whale, M51's spirals, and most of the Virgo cluster's highlights. I had a look at the Coma Cluster and could see a lot of faint fuzzies, down to maybe the dim 15th mag or so

Out of curiosity then I went and tried for 3c273, and that was easily visible, so I went on a hunt for some more QSO targets. SkySafari didn't have Markarian 421 in the database so I had to go and look up alternate designations (I found it under UGC6132), and I was able to select and goto, and see it on the screen. Two quasars seen and fairly easily at that too.

I'm quite liking the video astronomy aspect - I can get lots of subtle details quite easily on the showcase objects as well as hitting some real depths in the sky with very modest equipment. I had no idea it would this easy to observe 14th and 15th magnitude galaxies with a 6" scope when I started out in astronomy! I've no qualms about using goto like this, as I know if I have to I can starhop wherever I want to, I am just glad I don't have to!

I did take some photos, using the phone camera of the 3" screen. As you can imagine, the photos are definitely not public display quality, yet I feel happy looking at them. They are more useful as a reminder for the memory than as a record of the observation I think. I've a usb capture device en route to get a laptop recording.

[Astrojedi]

Sounds like a great first light... Excellent results

[seo]

That's a nice video setup first light. Congrats.  

[DoctorD]

I'm going to have to dig my SDC435 out and give it a go again.

Great results

Paul

[Martin Meredith]

Great report. As you say, not only can you see much more detail in brighter objects, but really deep space opens up for exploration.  Good to see someone else with a healthy interest in quasars!

Martin