Been out mooning again

[stargazerlily]

A lovely evening to try out my latest toy ... a dual axis motor for my SW 150PL. I only attached the RA motor this evening. The results ... very impressive.

I took quite a few videos of about 30-40 seconds duration and at different magnifications and each view didn't move at all!! Here are three photos which I took this evening.

The first photo is my first ever merged view using iMerge. Just two images were involved, just to get the hang of things. I did have a third image in this merged view but it had different exposure settings ... so I deleted the image (note to self ... don't change the exposure settings when taking videos to be used in iMerge).

The second photo is a real close up of the crater with the double central peaks (could anyone tell me the name of this crater ... thanks). For this photo I used a x2 Barlow along with the webcam, equivalent to a x3 eyepiece. Without the RA motor, I couldn't have taken the video.

Finally, the last photo is just a general mood scape view. Very nice too.

Still learning ...

Pete

[Parus major]

I'm saving up for a new mount but I think I'm getting a dual drive before then now!

Brilliant!

[stargazerlily]

The dual axis control only took about 5 minutes to fix to the mount. I had it on all the time so didn't really do a proper on vs off test. For that high mag video (of the two craters using the x2 Barlow) the crater was in that position for over 40 seconds (duration of the video). Without the motor I think it would have been impossible to keep the crater in the FOV.

Pete

[stargazerlily]

Just found out the name of the crater ... Copernicus

Pete

[Parus major]

I'll bite then and get one.

Here's something for you....

Virtual Moon Atlas Expert Software Informer: Latest version download, news and info about this Christian Legrand and Patrick Chevalley program. Virtual Moon Atlas Expert lets us to observe and study the moon and its surface.

[stargazerlily]

Thanks for the link. Excellent resource.

Pete

[bigal1]

Very nice images you got there well done , a tracking mount sure does help a lot