Testing out my new EAA rig, a Skywatcher 130 PDS on a HEQ5 PRO mount.

This is what went wrong during the session:

• Rain till 8 PM, making it necessary to set everything up late when it’s already dark and cold
• Forgot to install the the ZWO drivers on the old imaging laptop I want to use
• Polar alignment difficult with the northern part of the sky being cloudy
• Underestimated the swampy nature of my grass, making it hard to level
• The part of my garden with perfect view on Polaris is also the dog’s pooping grounds

I tried to to do some star alignments. Aldebaran was close. Betelgeuse was funny as the scope pointed to the ground.

Still very impressed with this mount. I will set up everything during the day tomorrow and play around with it.

After literally weeks with clouds and rain I finally got to set up the scope again. My plan was to capture Mars but the seeing was again not optimal – I captured a lot of data but I don’t think it will lead to anything good post processing. This was also my first session where I really had massive dew, something I need to take care of.

My goal for the next weeks is to have a look at the Triangulum Galaxy and the Crab Nebula and today I had a first few peeks with the 25 mm.

I hope to capture them with my camera at some point too, I’ve purchased a focal reducer to increase my FOV, I’m curious what I’ll manage to get.

I did capture some other nice sights. One of them is Albireo, I remember I posted about this in july after I made a picture with my phone. This one is definitely better.

I wanted to end the night with Orion but clouds made me call it a night.

I had a short but focused session last night. My initial goal was to capture Mars and Uranus with the planetary camera but the supermoon made things a bit difficult. I hope to revisit these planets later this year.

The summer triangle is slowly moving away from my usual observation sights so I’ll need to say my goodbyes soon to Vega, Deneb and Altair. New other prominent objects are showing up now, such as the lovely Pleiades.

I decided to have one last look at M57 and took an almost 4 minute exposure with the ZWO224MC.

The reward was worth the effort:

The area with the least clouds for me lately is everything within the summer triangle.

It’s actually possible to capture M57 with a smartphone and 25 mm eyepiece:

Clear, dark sky today, unfortunately on a midweek, so little time to observe.

I had a good look at the Dumbbell Nebula again and failed to find M56, a globular cluster. I did find another target though, the Blinking Planetary Nebula, with very little effort (or lots of luck, not sure).

The Messier catalogue consists of 110 deep sky objects discovered by Charles Messier. I managed to get two of them in my sights yesterday and even took a picture.

The Ring Nebula on the left shows as a faint grey ring through the scope but has a vibrant color palette only visible with cameras. The Andromeda Galaxy on the right is a very faint grey spot in my telescope and shows up as a fuzzy light ball in the picture.

The rest of the night was spent under a Waning Gibbous moon. Deep in the night I had Saturn, the moon, Jupiter and Mars all in the same part of the sky. All those planets will have optimal viewing conditions later this month and in case of Mars at the end of the year.