Tim Printy's Astronomy journal

I finally got out and tested the scope/drive combination. The scope got first light but that really does not count since I have shot through the scope before. I did try out the mount.  Because of clouds, I made some errors in autostar alignment. When I asked it to go to Mars, it was off by half the sky!  Anyway, I did get a chance to test the drive. It seemed stable enough. I even took a 30 second exposure of Mars and M44 through the 8-inch without guiding.  I was impressed. The scopes optics were a bit off so there is some distortion of the stars but the guiding appeared good and that was without using a guide scope or PEC.  I can hardly wait to get a night out at the dark sky site. I expect big things.  Here is the pic of the Mars and M44.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this