One night in June

Clear, dark skies have been practically non-existent in the Portland area so far this spring. What few there have been have mostly come unexpected (after a forecast of clouds), keeping me from taking advantage of them. With spring drawing to a close, I was determined to take advantage of Wednesday, June 20th. Initially, southern Oregon was forecast to be clear for three nights, the 20th through the 22nd, but this changed as the days drew near and spoiled what was to be a three-night RV expedition to Burns and perhaps Lakeview.

The night before I was to get the RV out of storage with the help of my son, I realized that the RV keys were in the glove compartment of our CRV, which was being used that week by my wife on her outing to Camp Namanu for volunteer work. My son graciously volunteered to drive out to the camp to get them. Had he not done that, I would have taken our Honda Civic on the astro-imaging expedition.... I was that desperate for my first night out in 2012.

So, yesterday I drove the RV over Mt. Hood and down Hwy 97 to Sunriver, OR, where just across the highway is a place that I used on one of my first imaging trips back in the 1990's. I arrived at this place, a rock quarry surrounded by forest, and was disappointed to find that the horizon, particularly in the south where I wanted to image, was not good. On to plan B... I went a few miles farther down 97 to Cascade Meadows RV Park, where I claimed a spot on the south edge of the park, overlooking a large meadow. I had visited this RV Park for imaging a couple years ago and found it to be relatively good.

Though a few clouds teased me on the western horizon, spilling over the crest of the Cascade range, and a few mosquitoes had me wondering if I was going to be swarmed, everything turned out pretty good. I came with a plan to image M104 (the Sombrero Galaxy) for the first time, to get a better image of M8 (the Lagoon nebula) than past attempts,  and to utilize eye-piece projection to image Saturn. In the end, I decided to use my Celestron C8 SCT with a new 0.63x focal-reducer/flattener. I've been wanting to reduce the weight on my C8 setup and was debating whether to resort to using the old 80mm refractor as a guide-scope or to use my new, light-weight Orion 50mm guide-scope. Some people have said that the 50mm might have problems guiding the C8 with its long focal length, however I had read where someone had done it with a 0.63 focal reducer and had no problems... so I gave it a try. That part of it worked out well; I had no guiding problems all night. I had considered also trying my new off-axis guider, but decided against it because I felt I would be over-doing the experimentation (and I really wanted to image my high priority targets).

I started off imaging M104 using prime-focus. The final product is shown below, the result of averaging two five-minute exposures (yes, I should have done more, but I was running out of time after struggles with the setup... more on that later). I've always liked this galaxy and it was great to finally image it. No darks or flats were used on this image.

The Sombrero Galaxy (2 x 5 min with C8 w/0.63x focal reducer/flattener)

When I finally moved on from M104 (which was getting too low on the horizon), I had already eaten into my allotted time to image Saturn. I left the focal reducer on and used my new Orion adapter that would fit over an eyepiece. I centered Saturn first using prime-focus and then quickly switched to the eyepiece (17mm). I had a hard time finding focus because the image seemed over-exposed (even at the very shortest exposure times) the distance between screen and focus knob was large (I really need to install that electronic focusser!). I tried an 8mm eyepiece with my light green filter,  hoping that would improve the exposure enough, but I had no luck. I never did get a good image of Saturn, despite the fact that it looked good to my eye directly through the eyepiece. I'm going to have to try this again sometime, maybe without the focal reducer to cut down the image intensity a bit. It would also help to be imaging a planet that was a bit higher off the horizon (the seeing seemed very bad).

After "visiting" Saturn, I slewed the scope to the Lagoon Nebula, which I don't think ever gets above 30 degrees at our latitude. The seeing is always marginal, but it is a bright object and nevertheless has the potential for good images. I took six two-minute exposures and five five-minute exposures; the latter is shown below. I will probably try to brighten the color in this a bit, but I'm pretty happy with the detail that is in it.

The Lagoon Nebula (5 x 5min with C8 w/0.63x focal reducer/flattener)

At this point I had a repeat of a problem that occurred in my initial setup: while slewing, the power cable for the mount jiggled and re-set the software forcing me to re-do the polar alignment. I couldn't do it. Both my Orion "EZ Finder Deluxe" and the 50mm guide scope were not be aligned well enough to the center of the FOV of the C8 that I could find the alignment stars. In hindsight, I could have played around with the EZ Finder more (I just found the adjustment screws for it), but the guide scope was at its limit and still not close. I guess I just got lucky in my initial alignment... it happened to be close and adjusting it put me close to the other alignment stars. No such luck on two attempts mid-way through the night so I decided to switch back to using my 80mm refractor where I never have had such  problem.

With what little time I had left, I decided to just image M51, the Whirlpool galaxy, which I never seem to get tired of imaging. At this point I noted that dew was starting to become a problem on the 50mm guide-scope. I considered just quitting for the night, but fought the urge off and pulled out my home-made dew heaters, which I made last season but never used. The worked great! I finished up the night with three eight minute exposures of M51 and it came out pretty nice (see below).

The Whirlpool Galaxy (3 x 8min with 80mm refractor)

After finishing M51 I looked to the south and became aware of clouds moving in. I looked to the northeast and saw the sky already beginning to brighten a bit at 3:30am (the draw-back of summer solstice). It was time to quit after another night of learning a few things the hard way while making a little bit of progress. I know that I need to come up with a robust fix to that power-cable issue and well as the finder-scope issue for the C8. I need to figure out how I'll make my next attempt at imaging a planet (probably Jupiter in August given that the weather is looking like crap for at least the next week and Saturn leaves us in July). I improved my focusing technique a bit tonight by making use of the mouse selected sub-frame capability in MaximDL and  using longer exposures to focus on the fainter stars near my imaging target (necessary to re-focus more often using the C8 due to "mirror-flop", so this is useful). All together, it was a good trip. After about three hours of sleep and a breakfast at the RV Park, I drank my "5Hr Energy" and took off for home... satisfied.