First images with my scope

[malc-c]

How jammy am I. Scope arrived yesterday and tonight is clear, still and full of stars

Anyway, as murphy's law would have it I only had a few hours before I needed to do child minding duties as the other half was going out, so I quickly dumped the tripod down roughly pointing north..clamped the tube on, then gave it half an hour to cool down whilst I set up the netbook and had some tea.

First light was on the moon - wow... don't remember it being that bright and detailed - mind you the last scope I looked through was half the 200P's aperture. Next up was Jupiter... four moons (three on one side, one on the other, and even in the light polluted skies of Stevenage I could make out the most prominent band when using a 8mm eyepiece.

OK hooked up the NexImage camera and captured some footage. The scope was way out of alignment so didn't track, but I caught something

Here is the result after registax (no idea what I was doing just clicked on stack and align leaving the settings at default. But its a start...

Shame things had to come to an end so the scope was dismounted and brought inside, not before a glance at M42 and the Pleiadies both of which were stunning in a wide field eyepiece.

[Sharpiejas]

Great image, hope to see some more soon

[starship trooper]

looks impressive well done mate

[The Bat]

That's good going for first night out!

Rachel

[Astro Imp]

Hi Malcolm,

Good on yer mate great first light bet you can't wait for next time.

How did you appease the gods of cloud, you know you shouldn't be able to use any new scope for at least a week

Enjoy many more nights like this.

[Skybrowser]

Very good first image! You'll get better with Registax over time. One thing to watch out for is to find the right frame to match the others to and the wavelets help enormously. Also try out different exposure, gain, brightness settings when capturing your avi file - it's sometimes a bit fiddly but good fun and after a while everything seems to click in place.

[malc-c]

Thanks for the kind words of encouragement people - Yeah, still need to play with the capture settings as parts were over exposed - but I'm pleased with the first attempts and in the short window I had...