Deep Sky Imaging Session - October 21, 2012

The sky in the early evening of October 20, 2012 was not bad compared to last October 13-14, 2012. The sky tonight was partly cloudy but one can still see a lot of stars that evening. I tried to test my CCD setup once again so since I plan to image Horsehead Nebula but constellation of Orion is still quite low so I have to wait till it rise at least 35 deg high before I start to do any testing. I mounted the ATIK 16HR CCD camera on my TV-101 refractor on top of a Vixen GPDX mount. Unfortunately, clouds started to interfere past midnight and made a hard downpour till early morning :( But I was able to get a test shot of M42 Orion Nebula using the Green filter through thin passing clouds. The output is not that good but at least I'm happy to get first light on DSO :) Exposure is 2 minutes unguided through the TV-101 refractor at 540mm f/5.4 .

I hope to do more testing on the ccd camera before the next ALP stargazing session next month.