I was out at HJRO from 2:15am until 3:30am, but sky conditions were bad

There was no need to announce we would be open because clouds that threatened to ruin the view moved in.

I didn't even open up the observatory, but just did a portable test eith a small rig running next to my car.

I tested how quickly I could setup the EQ mount and camera, laptop to run them from the car. It took about ten minutes to setup and three minutes to break down. I took test images and hd fun driving the scope from the iPad while sitting inside my car in the warmth.

I could see images streaming off the camera into the laptop sitting on my dash. I wish the sky conditions would have been better. There was a lot of haze and clouds giving some fairly horrible images. I still toyed a bit taking images hoping for breaks in the clouds, but the clouds and haze was like looking through soup. Early on the sky was a little better, but my first images of Orion were pretty bad so I doubt I'll have any usable images to post. In looked at, or I should say tried to image about ten objects, wide field in an hour. I tried to slew the telescope to the double cluster for the last shot, but the cord came out of the mount. I took an image anyway, but it was so cloudy the image didn't show a single star, just sky glow from clouds. When I locked up I could only see a few of the brightest stars and Jupiter in the mucky skies.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad