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Showing posts from July, 2022

IC 5070 / Pelican Nebula

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 7/3/22 -- Great day, clear night.  Moon at 17% and setting as the evening started.  No wind, mild temps, relatively low humidity.  Tonight's target: IC 5070 (the Pelican Nebula). Started PHD2 on the Odroid XU4 with an initial drift alignment error of -200' (pre-meridian flip).  Tightened on the right side of the mount (facing the front).  First adjustment, -186'...-150'...-65'...then over-corrected... 13.5'.  Ultimately settled to -0.85'. Ultimately, Ekos/Indi collected 108x120s lights.  Covered the OTA and pointed it at the house... then started a batch script at ~4am to collect bias and dark frames during the remainder of darkness.  In the afternoon, covered the OTA with a white tee shirt and collected flat frames at 1/1000 at ISO 100 along with dark flat frames for Astro Pixel Processor. In examining Telescopius' telescope simulator, concluded that a 2x binning (Scale set to 0.5 in the integration tab) would likely be best.  This would produce a fina

Indi Allsky Meteor

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 20220629 -- At 11:57:01, the Indi Allsky  camera on the back deck caught a meteor!  The system has an Svbony SV305  with the ancient C-mount Kodak 16mm movie lens.  Astrometry results . This shows a size of 12.4 x 7.78 deg and a pixel pitch of 35 arcsec/pixel.  While quite a stretch in the sky, this appears to align with  June Bootids . Indi Allsky camera shot for 06/29/2022 at 23:57 showing a meteor. AAS WorldWide Telescope view for the  plate solved shot .