Not long after that I decided I needed/wanted more aperture (just like every other astronomer out there). After lots of research, star party attendance and advice from my astronomy club members I finally settled on another Meade. I chose the LX90 8" Schmidt Cassegrain and have loved it ever since. What an amazing difference in the views presented by this wonderful scope. I've been carting it all over New England enjoying the views. After one night of dew on the corrector plate I made a dew shield out of sonatube and black self-stick felt. It's a little heavy, but it works fantastic. I've been out at star parties long after unprotected scopes have had to pack it in. A Kendrick dew heater came next and now I can stay out all night in any weather with no dew problems.
The next bug to hit was eye piece envy. Fortunately Meade was (and still is, I think) offering their eye piece promotion deal. I was able to pick up a pretty complete set of plossl's. Some time later I decided that these EP's just weren't what I wanted. I go to as many star parties as possible (my club is very active in outreach programs and I'm friendly with a few others). Fortunately astronomers are a friendly lot and I've been able to try out a great many EP's in my scope. I was able to determine that the best EP's for my scope are Pentax XL's and Meade UWA's. So I sold off a few of the Meade plossl's and picked up a Pentax 21mm a Meade 8.8 UWA and Meade 13.8 SWA. These have kept me happily viewing and sketching ever since.
After a while I decided to give imaging shot. I picked up a 400mm APO lens (Sigma) for my camera, mounted the whole thing on top of my scope and tried again. Focusing that beast is pretty tough and what are those lines in my image!? Oh wait, I've heard about those. They're star trails, aren't they? Okay, let's play with those for a bit. Hey, this is pretty easy.
Now I know what I'm doing (yeah, right), let's try a wide field shot. Oh wait, what about those trails? One quick post to www.arksky.org (ASO) and I learned about wedges and polar alignment. So it was back to the wallet for a wedge. Holy cow! How the heck does this polar alignment work? Well, back to ASO and Dr. Clay Sherrod's guides and I was able to figure out how to polar align on a wedge. I backed off the big lens for a while and tried some wide field shots with a normal lens. Oh oh, the trails are back, smaller but still there. Okay, now I need an illuminated reticle. Boy, this is a never ending spending spree, isn't it!
Okay, now the trails are gone. Let's try that big lens again. Oh man, another step backward! Tracking is much more critical with this power. Lots of practice with manual guiding and I finally managed to get some clean images. No real DSO's yet, but they're not far away. After a while, I noticed that lots of folks had shifted to digital camera's and wondered about that. Well, I waited and waited for price drops and expertise to accumulate. Then Meade came out with their Lunar Planetary Imager (LPI) so I picked one up. Wow, this is cool! After a few attempts I got some great shots of the moon (lots more to do here). I haven't had a chance to try it on planets yet but I expect it will be pretty good there too.
But the best thing about this little gem is that it can be used as an autoguider. No more long nights with my eye glued to the eye piece making tiny corrections to keep the guide star in the little square. I just tested it the other night and it kept a star in its' field of view for 30 minutes. It would have gone longer, but I decided that was enough. I can't wait to get out and shoot some longer images with it!
6/20/2005
Sketching is what I think I do best, now that I've gotten a little better at reproducing nice round stars. Actually I cheat a little there. If you look at some of my older sketches here, you'll see very odd shaped stars. That's because I started out just scanning in my sketches and then reversing the colors. Then I figured out that I'd be better off just reproducing the image using Photoshop or Illustrator by starting with black background, drawing a nice white circle and then just using different size dots to represent the "stars" that I'd drawn while out in the field. I think I like it much better this way. It's a little repetative but at least the stars are nice and round like I saw them through the scope.
Many folks have more complex setups than I and they generally produce amazing images. I'm sort of low-tech kind of guy when it comes to astronomy. I like the wide angle views I get with my little ole Ricoh piggybacked on the scope. The 400mm APO lens can produce some really nice images if, that's a big if, I get it focused properly. The wide angle lenses are going to see more use in the coming months as I explore attaching my DSI Pro to them for wider views than I get through the scope. This should have the added advantage of letting me autoguide through the telescope while imaging through the camera.
Anyway, I've actually spent much more time with astrophotography this summer and fall than I thought I would. It really is addicting. The DSI-Pro is a great imaging setup for beginners and pro's. I've been able to create some very nice images in a short amount of time. I've also seen some amazing images by friends on the Net. This camera won't replace the big boys out there, but it sure is perfect for me as I don't think the rest of my setup could take advantage more sophisticated imagers.
I've learned so much about imaging, I don't know where to begin. It's much more complicated than I thought it was. Every imaging session convinces me that I need more patience. I need to really extend my sessions by either taking longer exposures or many more of them. Longer exposures will require guiding, which I can do if I image through the DSI piggybacked on the LX90 and use my LPI to guide through the scope. This, of course, requires a fairly bright star in field of view of the LX90 because the LPI is much less sensitive than the DSI-Pro.