Koehler Urban Astrophotography

 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 wou...

 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 .

04/19/2022:  Refurbished & extended the deck... changing the perspective on the sky from the back yard.  Southern views are now possible without lugging the telescope to the front yard.  With a clear night, this calls for some testing.  Albeit with an enormous (if waning) moon at 90%.  Conditions overall: Meteoblue Astro prediction for 04/19/2022. Clear skies, giant moon. Cleardarksky.com prediction for MoCo seems to agree (mostly). Note Seeing is also frowny face. Test target...largely inappropriate for this kind of sky but it's just a test... is  M65  simply because it's exceptionally high in the southern sky...and that's the interesting aspect of the sky this deck extension may open up. Indi Allsky is setup with the (ichy) 8mm Kodak c-mount lens... but is showing this exposure profile from ~20:30 to ~21:00: Indi Allsky exposure in Seconds from sundown to ~21:00. Single 13.8s exposure from Indi Allsky cam with the 8mm Kodak C-mount lens showing a...