Moon Phase Project

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Day 11 waxing gibbous

 

Approx. Moon Rise / Meridian / Set: 1525 / 2125 / 0325
% Illuminated: 91%
Approx. Terminator: 45° to 58° W
Hightlighted Features: oceanus Procellarum; craters Anaximenes, Carpenter, Anaximander, J.Herschel, Harpelus, Aristarchus, Marsenius, Segner, Bettinus, Kircher

Observations

Sept. 19, 2010, pm

  • 100% clear, 2/5 transparency, 2/5 seeing

  • ED80 & LX10 mounted on Orion Atlas EQ-G (PC)

  • backyard, Ottawa, Canada

  • terminator ~ 51° W

Seeing and transparency wasn't great, but I figured I'd try anyway.  I also tried to get the Bluetooth wireless link between PC and mount working but ended up just going with the serial cable.

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ED80 - 149kb ED80 + 2x Barlow (mosaic of 6 frames) - 519kb LX10 + 2x Barlow - 199kb LX10 + 2x Barlow - 177kb
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LX10 + 2x Barlow - 162kb LX10 + 2x Barlow - 146kb    

Oct. 18, 2010, pm

  • 100% clear, 4/5 transparency, 2/5 to 3/5 seeing

  • ED80 & LX10 mounted on Orion Atlas EQ-G (PC)

  • backyard, Ottawa, Canada

  • terminator ~ 45° W

By 11pm the seeing seemed much better than the forecast, I'm guessing closer to 4/5.  I did some visual observation of Jupiter beforehand...wow, amazing!  After taking a large bought of moon images, I spent a lot of time (more than I was originally planning to) doing visual observation of other objects like comet Hartley and M42.  Finally packed up around 1:45am.  One thing I tried as an experiment was putting a mirror diagonal before the 2x Barlow in order to give extra magnification.  Some contrast and sharpness is lost by doing this I think, based on the resulting images.  On a separate occasion I measured the actual magnification with the 2x shorty Barlow (Meade #126) alone and with a diagonal in front.  I measured 2.3x and 3.9x respectively.

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ED80 + SLP - 155kb ED80 + SLP + 2x Barlow (mosaic of 5 frames) - 565kb ED80 + SLP + 2x Barlow + diagonal (mosaic of 5 frames) - 680kb  
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ED80 + SLP + 2x Barlow + diagonal (mosaic of 5 frames) - 486kb LX10 + SLP (mosaic of 6 frames) - 783kb LX10 + SLP + 2x Barlow (mosaic of 12 frames overlaid on non-Barlowed mosaic) - 2.7mb  

Mar. 16, 2011, pm

  • 100% clear, 3/5 transparency, 2/5 seeing

  • LX10 mounted on Orion Atlas EQ-G (PC)

  • backyard, Ottawa, Canada

  • terminator ~ 56° W

First night with replacement EQDIR, and everything worked great!  Setup before supper, and was quite cloudy at the time.  By 9pm the clouds were gone just like the CDS forecast.  Was broadcasting live on NSN for a while but wireless link to laptop and camera started acting up.  I later had to use a crossover cable to get the last of my Moon images.

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LX10 + M&S (mosaic of 11 frames) - 1.9Mb      

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Last updated: 08-Nov-11

 

Copyrights to all content from the webpages hosted here belongs to Jim Thompson. Nov. 2009.