Moon last week

Had a great observing session last Wednesday night. Stayed up until 4am, doing a mixture of astrophotography and setup tweaks.

Webcamming of Jupiter, a failed :-( attempt to image Himalia, Jupiter's fifth brightest moon, and some shots of the moon with the Canon 400D. Here's a sample showing the crescent moon as seen that night. On the full image you can see Mare Orientale quite nicely on the limb.

Kit update and 1st Jupiter image with 10"

Last week during a rare clearish night I put the primary mirror and its cell back in the 10", and did a rough collimation with my home-made Cheshire eyepiece and then did a basic star donut collimation. All seemed good, but the seeing wasn't fantastic, about III.

I waited up until 3.30am (BST) when Jupiter had cleared the tree in my neighbour's garden behind the obs (it's dying, slowly ;-). At 266x you could easily see the missing SEB, the GRS just coming into view and some detail in the cloud belts.

This is a picture made from video I took, processed in Registax. Camera is a Toucam Pro 740k, and I used my x2 Meade Barlow. Not the best image in the world, I'm sure I can tweak the collimation better than how it is now. Been reading Thierry Legault's great website article about collimation so I'm clear that I definitely need to work harder at getting that right to get the best out of my system.

Waiting for the next free clear night!

List Management

Working on lots of different things at the moment:

• Having recently cleaned the primary mirror in my 10" newt, I'm trying to improve the time it takes to reach thermal equilibrium, using fans, cold plates and a peltier cooler;

• improving stability of the mount and associated ironmongery, including the installation of a Hargreaves Strut;

• keeping up with general maintenance on the observatory - have filed down the protruding end of a woodscrew that was causing the roof to snag now and then...

Just need a clear night to collimate the scope. And more time. DESPERATE to start imaging Jupiter.