Observing Log for Mike Durkin 6/25-26/2022 about 9:30PM-2:00AM Locust Valley, NY Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 3/5 Temperature: about 70-80 Equipment: Celestron Ultima 8 with PEC More playing around with the ASIAir. I wanted to test out the polar alignment function. Turns out I was hitting the wrong icon/menu item, but I didn't realize this until the end of the night. According to the software, the RA axis was about 1-2 arc-minutes away from the pole after I tried making adjustments. Making azimuth adjustments was not simple the way I was doing. Looks like I would need to loosen the bolts and use the side screw to make fine azimuth adjustments. In the end I am not sure how good the polar alignment really was. After disconnecting the ST4 cable, the DEC drift did reach over 8 arcminutes after about a couple of minutes. I also think I found a more "proper" combination of adapters on the Celestron off axis guider. After getting things set up and being a little better polar aligned than last week, I decided to try to image the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. I only took 10 light frames, although 2 of them show some star streaking. I also noticed that there was some drifting between the light frames. I don't know if that is a problem of something slipping or if my polar alignment wasn't good enough. The autoguiding seemed to indicate that the star never drifted very far, usually less than 2 arcminutes. 6/19/2022 about 9:30PM-12:30AM Locust Valley, NY Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 3/5 Temperature: 55-70 Equipment: Celestron Ultima 8 with PEC First use pf the ASIAir Plus in the field. Originally I was only going to see how autoguiding would work. Using the ASI 174mm mini, it actually worked pretty well when using it as the only camera attached. The camera seems to be pretty good at getting fainter stars and the larger chips helps. After that, I decided to see if I could attach the Canon T3i DSLR with the Celestron off axis guider. It took me a little bit to make sure that the camera was connected. One feature that was really cool was the plate solving. It typically took only a couple of seconds to plate solve an image once it was downloaded to the ASIAir. On the negative side, it loks like I can't do a polar alignment with my Celestron mount. I'll have to see if maybe there is a way to do that semi-manually, but I doubt it. Focusing was also a bit of a pain. I must remember to use the Bahtinov mask. Additionally even though I wanted to take a couple of quick pictures of some golublar clusters, I did not really even try to polar align, and the test images may have streaked a tiny bit or the focus was off. The globulars that I thought about trying to image and that I previewed were M80 and M92. I also din't set up any counterweights which I would really need to do. 6/17/2022 about 10:30PM-12:30AM Locust Valley, NY Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 4/5 Temperature: 70-80 Equipment: Stellarvue 70mm refractor Observed variable stars Z UMa, U UMi, V UMi, and α Her. At one point I also tried S Lib, but it was just barely visible and I was not able to easily see the comparisoin stars. M4: just barely visible with the 6.7mm eyepiece M12: Easy to detect, although a little faint. I might have been able to start resolving some stars of the cluster with averted vision, although they could also have been foreground stars. 6/4/2022 about 10:00PM-12:30AM Locust Valley, NY Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 4/5 Temperature: 55-65 Equipment: Celestron Ultima 8 with PEC Tried looking at one of my astronomy mags for sme targets. Settled on one of the articles that focused on deep sky targets in Hercules. M84: one of the objects in Virgo and Markarian's Chain. I barely was the galaxy. I could make make out any of the other objects that made up the "face" part of the chain. Alpha Her: Double star. Very close to each other, best to use the 6.7mm eyepiece to resolve. The brighter star appeared yellow-orange, the dimmer one a muted blue. 95 Her: Another double star. A little easier to resolve the Alpha Her. Roughly equal magnitude. The colors seemed to be blue-white and yellow-white. NGC 6210: Planetary nebula, also called the Turtle Nebula. Bright enough and easy to pick out with low magnification, although the greenish color was not obvious. High magnification (6.7mm) could make out the shape a bit, but then could not pick up much if any color. HK Lyr: Passed by this carbon star. I was expecting it to look more red, ut just seemed mostly orange M57: Ring Nebula. Best at 17mm and 6.7mm. Could start to really see the ring shape, although had to use some averted vision with the 6.7mm in order to detect some details. M56: Globular cluster. Just barely seen, could have easily overlooked if I was not trying to find it. No stars were resolved, and it was a little smaller than I expected. Considering how faint this appeared, I'm not sure I would have had any luck with other globulars. Crescent Nebula: Not really sure if I started to see this, or was I imagining some faint tendrils between stars. During the night, some of the automatic lights kept getting triggered, which was a problem for night vision. I also didn't count on the telescope getting dew so quickly, but I did plug in a dew heater strip after about an hour. Other Log Entries <-- 2021  Jan   Feb  Mar  Apr   May  Jun   Jul  Aug   Sep  Oct  Nov   Dec  2023 -->