Late now before it gets dark.....

[kirkster501]

Turned out nice and clear last night but even at 22:00 was still too light to get the camera going.  Had to be up at 5 this morning so skipped last night and just had 15 mins with the bins.  Hate missing clear opportunities but at our latitude in summer, it's a bit difficult to do a great deal about it.  All that gear doing nothing makes me feel a bit guilty....

[alan potts]

17 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

Turned out nice and clear last night but even at 22:00 was still too light to get the camera going.  Had to be up at 5 this morning so skipped last night and just had 15 mins with the bins.  Hate missing clear opportunities but at our latitude in summer, it's a bit difficult to do a great deal about it.  All that gear doing nothing makes me feel a bit guilty....

Even here it is about 9.15 before I can get going, I guess some of our friends up in Scotland never really see dark now.

Alan

[Floater]

12 minutes ago, alan potts said:

Even here it is about 9.15 before I can get going, I guess some of our friends up in Scotland never really see dark now.

Alan

Quite correct, Alan.

 

[Rob]

Yep. I think we are all starting feel true dark night slipping. I like to take this period of the year to switch over to sky browsing/sweeping on the Summer selections. There's nothing like t-shirt observing to recharge the Astro batteries!.

And, on the other hand it not long now to the Summer solstice. The nights start to draw in again (slowly I know).

Rob

Edited May 13, 2019 by Rob

[geordie85]

Yep. I took my last imaging opportunity last night since astro darkness is disappearing and the moon is up and getting bigger now. 

My plan over the summer is to work out any tilt and spacing issues I have ready for astro darkness returning 

[DaveS]

I've finished too for the summer, though I've still got a bit of astro dark there's also a big bright moon getting in the way. 3nm NB might be doable on the right targets when the moon is out of the way, none of which are well enough placed just yet.

Edited May 13, 2019 by DaveS

[geoflewis]

I was out imaging until dawn, stopping just after 4am with a bright blue sky, both to capture some targets, but also to do some summer nights testing. The sky never got really dark as the brief true night was lit up by the Moon, then we were well into twilight by the time it set. I was RGB imaging a couple of globular clusters for my Messier list as they are bright targets that can cut through the bright background pretty well. Certainly not much point going afrer any dim targets for the next couple of months, but with Jupiter and Saturn so low this apparition I thought I'd use this summer to grab some of the brighter summer Messiers that I have previously ignored, or have only got poor versions.

I was also using the opportunity to experiment with PHD2 algorithms by using PPEC for RA and Hysteresis for Dec, the combination of which gave better guiding performance than my previous Hysteresis for RA and Resist Switch for Dec. My AP1200 is a well behaved mount with very little backlash, so the thinking is that Resist Switch might be a too aggressive DEC algorithm, so I'll continue with the new settings for a while. Here is a screen grab from PHD2 Log Viewer which reports less than 0.5" RMS (excluding the dithers) over a 3.5 hour session on M5, with both RA and Dec in balance at 0.33", showing a nice even scatter graph. This dispalyed graph is just the last half an hour or so, with stats and scatter for the full 3.5 hours; the graph looks pretty much the same the entire 3.5 hours.

I've yet to process the M5 data, but hopefully it will turn out ok.

Cheers, Geof

[Gina]

I'm hoping to cover the Milky Way in Ha but don't know when.

[kirkster501]

I am aiming to concentrate on the moon as and when I can and see what this Meade 14" ACF can do.  Also some wide field DSLR with Samyang 135.