Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Saturn imaging (12th April 2009)

One image from the archives... I shot Saturn -at Vesanto in central Finland- with my C8 OTA & 2x Barlow lens. Used camera type was Philips SPC900NC. I had a lot of interference lines visible in stacked image. Periodic noise was needed to be removed with IRIS, postprocessing was done at Photoshop CS2.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Unsuccessfull moon imaging

This time I did not had a good luck... According to yellow almanac, full moon today was rising at 23:23 (in Helsinki region). I checked skies, but too much clouds on distant horizon to see the moon. I am going to attempt photography of "low moon" again, at 7th July 2009.

Friday, June 5, 2009

PC equipment updates

Since I will update my HEQ-5 mount to GoTo-option, I need a RS232 -serial connection to laptop. I have a already a USB-to-serial converter, but it only has a one serial port. So I have ordered DeLock PCMCIA -adapter card, providing 4 COM-ports. This would allow to connect a mount itself and two focusers -> one port would be still free.

Installation was pretty straightforward: plug in the card, select manually suitable drivers for win XP and final testing of card. To control panel, four COM -ports were added: