Outreach Is The Cure For "Jaded".

The 15" and 20" Obsession(s)
were instrumental in Portal and
at the Grand Canyon.

Without question, the rate of the posts to this blog has....shall we say....occurred at a less than furious pace over the last six months.  All I can say in my own defense is that sometimes life gets in the way and if I have to choose between living life and writing about it, I'm always going to choose "living life".  It's not that I haven't been doing anything in that time - quite the contrary.  In the last 6 months I've been blessed enough to:

• Work near full-time hours with two different clients.  It's not lost on me that while many people are still struggling for work, I have almost too much of it.  I try not to complain about the demand that it places on my everyday life. It's a blessing to be in a position that I've had to turn away work and I'm grateful for it.
• Even with two(ish) jobs, I've been able to spend a good amount of time observing - trips to dark skies have abounded.
• Multiple western Arizona trips including 5 days around the All Arizona Messier Marathon in March.
• An invitation to observe near Portal, AZ and the Arizona Sky Village with some good friends in April.
• A trip to southern Utah for the annular eclipse in May.
• There have been many significant equipment changes which I'll detail some other time.
• I've managed to do quite a bit of astrophotography too - some of it is even decent.
• I've been blessed enough to do a lot of outreach work - and that's what I'll be covering today.

Leo Triplet shot at the All Arizona Messier Marathon.  10.5 hours total exposure with QHY8PRO and Explore Scientific ES127CF refractor. 

Give Something and Get Something

One of the ways that I try to conduct myself in daily life is to remember that I should always be giving something back to this life that has rewarded me so richly beyond what I deserve.  I fall short of this ideal much of the time, but when I manage to live up to it - I am inevitably the one who comes out on the winning end of the bargain.  When it comes to astronomy and outreach, this axiom has proven to be even more true.  When I talk about outreach, I'm talking about any sort of astronomical activity where I am not the intended primary beneficiary of the activity.  This can include everything from writing this blog to helping a club member out with some image processing tips to settting up a telescope and showing the universe to a complete novice.  It has yet to fail that when the motive is selfless, the reward is always beyond anything I could have imagined.  This is the beauty of outreach.

The kind of outreach I'm talking about here is the more common definition - setting up a telescope and showing the universe to less experienced eyes.  I've always been keen on outreach and some years ago, back in the early 2000's I did a good amount of it locally.  I'd like to say that work, life and family made it difficult to continue the outreach work - but if I'm being honest, the truth is that selfishness is what made it difficult.  I focused more on things that had a direct payoff for me...and in the end found that it was a far less fulfilling way to proceed through life.  One of the things that I've found to be true, at least in my case, is that we tend to become jaded.  After I've looked at Saturn a hundred times it becomes 'just Saturn' to me.  Let me show Saturn for the first time to a child who's never looked through a telescope before and it reminds me why I fell in love with the night sky in the first place.  Outreach is the cure for jaded.  This time around in my haphazard and checkered amateur astronomy career, a number of things have come together at just the right time and in just the right sequence to renew my love for this amazing hobby obsession. 

While the initial intention was honorable, my outreach activities weren't entirely altruistic starting out.  Last November I fulfilled a dream of purchasing a travel trailer for camping and amateur astronomy.  It has become affectionately known as "The Command Center" amongst my astronomy friends.  When January 1st, 2012 rolled around I was one of the first in line to volunteer to setup a telescope for this year's Grand Canyon Star Party - North Rim.  While I was excited about the prospects of the outreach and sharing the night sky with visitors to one of the most amazing places in the world, I was equally excited about being given a campsite for the command center in the North Rim Campground for eight nights.  Getting a campsite for one night is difficult enough, but getting one for eight nights is next to impossible.  I began to daydream about all the daytime wanderings that would now be possible.  In the end the outreach was the highlight but more on that later. 

Mount Lemmon and Messier



My June 2012 observing site



In early March, as I was preparing to haul The Command Center out for the All Arizona Messier Marathon, I was contacted by one of my astronomy friends to see if I had any interest in doing some outreach at the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter.  I quickly answered "Duh!!"  Of course I would!  On a couple of occasions since then I've made the 3 hour trek to the 9100 foot summit of Mt. Lemmon and assisted with their SkyNights program.  Besides getting the thrill of sharing some people's first experience with the night sky through a telescope, it's always a joy to share the sky with people who are genuinely interested in the knowledge that you have to share.  It's that exchange that makes outreach so much fun.  Being able to view the universe through a 32" Ritchey-Chretien from the top of a 9000' Sky Island doesn't hurt either.  There is interest on both parts (mine and the SkyCenter) to make that a more permanent arrangement but as of yet that hasn't completely materialized.  If you ever make time to get down to Tucson, Arizona a trip to the SkyCenter and a trip to the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab should be on your required list of things to do.  You can't appreciate the size of an 8.4 meter mirror until you're standing next to it.

In late March, I did indeed haul out The Command Center for the All Arizona Messier Marathon and it was a great time.  As I used the five day trip entirely for astrophotography, I had a lot of time to walk the observing field and catch up with friends old and new alike.  I spent a bit of time with some students from ASU and a young woman out for her first star party ever and did a little outreach and promotion of astronomy in general.  Highlight of the trip though was the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time with a young guy who's fanatical about astronomy outreach.  Spend five minutes in a room with Kevin Legore of Focus On Astronomy and you'll be ready to run out and point a telescope skyward to find all the stuff that William Herschel missed the first time around.  His efforts are tireless and he's regularly hosting events in an effort to share the night sky with new eyes whenever he can.  It was a sad day for Arizona astronomy when he moved to southern California soon after the star party.  He continues his outreach work in So-Cal and occasionally makes it back to Arizona as well.  If you get a chance to attend or support one of his events I highly encourage you to do so.  Kevin is also a longtime fixture at the South Rim edition of the Grand Canyon Star Party.  In his work life he's a purveyor of fine astronomy instruments. If you just want to talk about astronomy equipment, he's also a walking encyclopedia of astro-gear knowledge - so stop in at Woodland Hills Telescope and chat him up if you're in the area.  







Grand Canyon Star Party

It took six months to get here, but finally it was time to make the trek northward for the Grand Canyon Star Party - North Rim.  The Tucson Astronomy Club typically handles the festivities at the much larger and more crowded South Rim.  A few years ago the Saguaro Astronomy Club assumed the duties of providing telescopes and outreach at the North Rim.  The two star parties are only 10 miles apart if you're a bird, but they're two entirely different worlds.  They're both an awesome time....just different.  We arrived early on Saturday and claimed our campsite.  After setting up camp we drove down to the Grand Canyon Lodge to setup telescopes on the veranda - overlooking the Grand Canyon.  At the South Rim there are more scopes and it's a bigger affair.  At the North Rim, there's only about a dozen scopes but it's such an intimate setting that you can trip and spill a drink right into the canyon.  We set up the heavy artillery near the door leading into the sun room - the highest traffic area in the lodge.  I prepared my 15" Obsession right next to the ramp that empties onto the veranda and my friend Chris setup his 20" Obsession behind it, overlooking the canyon and commanding the attention of every person within sight of it. 

When the sun had set and Saturn appeared, the madness began with a quickness.  Before twilight had even really set in, the line at my telescope was twenty people deep all waiting for a look at Saturn.  It was awesome!  People were astounded at the views and what could be seen through a telescope.  It gave a great opportunity to expose people to amateur astronomy in one of the greatest settings in the world.  As night fell it got dark down in the canyon - as in pitch black.  But looking skyward, it was a dark grey with what can only be described as a stoopid amount of starlight.   The Milky Way was obnoxiously bright and particulate matter in the atmosphere - presumably from the New Mexico wildfires - completely blotted out any indication that Flagstaff and Phoenix were to the south.  This pattern would repeat itself for all eight nights.  When you get eight straight nights at 8200' elevation with 10% humidity and temperatures in the mid 50's and absolutely no light pollution the astronomy Gods have smiled upon you.

I got to share the universe with so many excited people and it renewed everything about amateur astronomy for me in just that first night.  In most excellent fashion I got to repeat it for eight nights.  I've rediscovered my love of visual observing and got to put a lot of smiles on people's faces in the process.  I figure that I met somewhere around 1500 people in those eight nights and counted at least 24 countries represented.  Over and over I heard things like:

• Is that fake? 
• Is that real? 
• It looks like a picture.
• I've never seen anything like that in my life.
• I had no idea that you could see those things with your own eye.

Over and over people were amazed and happy that we had come to share the night sky with them.  If I heard thank you once, I heard it a thousand times that week.  On the first and second nights we were priveleged to spend time with an 8 year old named Lauren.  She was so excited the second night that she was jumping up and down while she stood in line.  She soaked up every object that was shown to her and stayed excited for more.  That sort of enthusiasm is infectious.  Over the course of the week I had at least a dozen people who were pretty advanced in their years - seniors if you will - who commented that they'd never seen anything so wonderful in their life and that everyone should see this stuff at least once. 

On Wednesday night I had the privilege of being the speaker for the evening and presented a topic on the distance scale of the universe.  It was well received and one little girl was so enthralled that she hung around afterward to talk some more with me about it and spent much of the evening at the telescope with me asking questions and reconciling her views in the eyepiece with the information from my presentation.  It was just awesome stuff. 

What was in it for me?  Depends on how you measure it.  If you measure it in the things of this world - it was a losing proposition.  I paid money out of my own pocket to haul a travel trailer 300 miles up 7000 feet of elevation gain and gave up a week of my life showing the universe to the public for a few hours each night.  I was reimbursed for none of it.  And if that's the way that you measure....you're missing out on the whole thing.  Because I got so much out of it that I can't wait to waste all that time and money again next year - even if it costs twice as much. I got to:


• watch people's minds expand at the sight of a universe they never knew was there.
• see an old woman cry at the sight of Saturn's rings.
• stoke the imaginations of children who were curious about the sky.
• watch the sunset in the Grand Canyon eight straight nights for free.
• laugh, and laugh, and laugh with friends from my astronomy club.
• spend 9 days with absolutely no technology between me, my family and our surroundings.
• hike in the Grand Canyon and explore Northern Arizona - for free.

I can't wait now for the next new moon myself so I can get back out and image and observe our universe.  It's like being a newcomer to the hobby all over again, you can't wait to see it all.  And I can't wait for next year so that I can do it all again.  Outreach reminds me of what's important in this life - it's the giving and sharing.  It's being selflessly available to share what you have to offer whenever the opportunity presents itself.  My tendency in life is to be harsh and rigid and it never pays off well.  The outreach opportunities - especially Mt. Lemmon and Grand Canyon Star Party - are the examples that remind me of the true rewards in this world.  If I've learned one thing in this life and this hobby it's that you should give without expecting anything in return wherever possible.  You'll inevitably be rewarded beyond anything you could have imagined.

Various and Sundry Things

I've had a few things that I've been meaning to talk about and they've been hangin' around on my back burner for a little while now.  I enjoy the mechanical and technical aspects of imaging as much as the actual images, so that's what I'm going to talk about this time out.  First I want to give a little love to Ed Thomas and his company Deep Space Products.  I've had occasion to interact with Ed on a couple of different things in the last couple of months and I've come away with a much better astro-life as a result.

Active Cooling for the Edge HD!!

Cooling Fans installed on my
11" Edge HD telescope

First - if you own an Edge HD telescope or one of the regular Celestron Schmidt Cassegrains that have the new tubes featuring vents at the back - you just have to get yourself a set of TEMP-est fans from Deep Space Products.  The picture here is of the fans as they are installed on my 11" Edge HD scope.  They're a pretty nifty design.

A fan installs on each side, replacing the stock vents that come with the scope.  The fans themselves have a micron filter to help keep dust out of the scope.  There is a 12 volt plug on each side (2.5 mm), and either of the plugs can be used to power both fans.  The fans are connected together from inside the tube by a plug that is supplied with the fans.  One fan blows air into the telescope, and the other fan blows air out of the telescope.  Installation took me all of about ten minutes and is accomplished with nothing more than a single Phillips head screwdriver.

• Using the screwdriver, loosen the screws holding the stock vents onto the telescope and remove them.
• Remove the stock vents.
• Plug the connecting power cable into on of the fans, and thread it into the scope behind the mirror.  The mirror surface itself isn't exposed here, so it's pretty much impossible to screw this up. 
• Seat the first fan into place and hold it.
• Tip the scope to the side so that the fan is at the top of the scope...and the power cable drops toward the bottom. 
• Fish the power cable through the second vent and connect it to the second fan.
• Seat the second fan in the vent.
• Tighten down the screws.  Be gentle when doing this so as not to crack the fan housing.
• Connect to a 12 volt power supply.

It's really that simple.  It took me as long to write that as it will take you to do it once you get your fans.  I know what you're thinking.  "But Mike, do they work?"  In my ever humble opinion, yes they do.  Without the fans installed I put a thermometer inside of the OTA and put it outside to measure how long it would take for the scope to reach equilibrium.  On that chilly December night there was a 16ºF temperature difference from my home and the outside temperature.  That's right, I used the phrase chilly December night and 16ºF in the same sentence.  Just one of the many perks of living in Arizona my friends.  We call that "winter".  But I digress.  It took the telescope 145 minutes to get within 2º of the outside air.  Note that the outside temperature dropped 4º in that time for a total differential of 20ºF.

That's all fine and good, but what did it do with the fans?  Let's just say it did better.  When I placed the telescope outside the next night with the fans installed there was an 18ºF difference between the inside and outside temperature.  The telescope was within 2º of equilibrium at the 90 minute mark.  Note that the outside temperature dropped 6º during that time for a total differential of 24ºF.

To summarize:

• Without Fans:  145 minutes to cool a total of 20º
• With Fans: 90 minutes to cool a total of 24º

The best part of the whole thing?  You can use the fans while you're observing so that they keep up with continued drops in temperature as the night progresses.  Even though I ended my tests at around 9pm each night, the temperature drops another 15º to 20º by sunrise the next morning and you want the telescope to keep up with the temperature for optimum viewing and imaging.  In both short and long exposures taken with the fans running I can see vibration evident in the images.  Focus remains as sharp as if the fans weren't running at all.  But the fans aren't my only interaction with Ed as of late

Hypertune is the real deal

If you've been following for any length of time, you know that I've had some seriously frustrating equipment issues since mid summer.  In an effort to prevent the irresponsible purchase of an Astro Physics AP900 with all the trimmings, I took my Celestron CGE mount to Deep Space Products for a Hypertune.  The results have been astounding.  No, it didn't turn my mount into an AP900 or other high end offering, but it's vastly improved for my uses.  Nothing is more demanding on a mount than deep sky astrophotography.  Okay, maybe dropping the mount out of an airplane is more demanding, but I'm talking about legitimate use here.  When I got the mount back from Ed, it was like it was all brand new again. 

The first night home I set it up in my backyard to test everything out and started the tried and true Celestron two star alignment.  The first star - Vega - was just inside the outer ring of my Telrad when the scope stopped its slew.  With the second star - Fomalhaut - the mount placed the star on the CCD chip and asked me to finish up the alignment.  This was a promising start, but nothing spectactular.  Ed had mentioned that when he took the mount apart, that both axes were cross threaded.  He said it was common for CGE mounts to have one of them cross threaded - but he'd not seen both of them in the same mount.  He indicated I could now expect better go-to performance once the scope was aligned. 

Dutifully, the Celestron hand controller asked if I wanted to add a calibration star and I opted to do so.  I always opt for the calibration stars.  In this case it selected Aldebaran.  I waited with baited breath as the scope slewed all the way around to the other side of the sky and placed Aldebaran about 5 arc minutes from the center of the CCD chip.  Nearly perfect.  Subsequent calibration stars were all placed on the crosshairs superimposed over the center of the image in Maxim DL.  I was ecstatic at this sort of performance.  Autoguiding has become a true pleasure as well.  Graphs are now nice and flat with only occasional guiding corrections.  The shot of the double cluster shown below is a testament to the guiding the CGE now routinely provides.



NGC 869 & NGC 884
Captured with a Vixen ED80SF on my CGE Mount
12 x 120 seconds



Celestron's All Star Polar Alignment

What is that you ask?  It's a nifty little tool built into more recent versions of the Celestron firmware for their Nexstar hand controllers.  Essentially, the controller pays attention to the amount of slewing that you have to do in order to center the alignment stars as you go through the initial setup.  Once this is complete, it can use that information to calculate how far off the polar alignment is for the telescope.  The hand controller will even show you how much it has calculated if you navigate through the menu structure to Align -> Polar Align -> Display Alignment.  It will tell how far off in azimuth and altitude it has calculated that you are based on the initial alignment.  Too good to be true?  I wondered about it myself.

When I setup an imaging session, I never put an eyepiece into the telescope.  I do all of the alignment via CCD camera and screen.  Within Maxim DL, I turn on crosshairs and have a continuously downloading image being taken as I go through the alignment process.  While taking constant 1/2 second exposures at 4x binning, I nudge the telescope with the hand controller keys until each star is centered on the crosshairs.  Using this method I estimate that each alignment star is somewhere around 5 to 10 arc seconds from the center of the imaging chip.

I've been using the All Star Polar Alignment routine for awhile to image via Hyperstar at f/2 and 560mm focal length.  I've always worked on the assumption that the routine would be 'good enough' for this type of work and it has been.  However, as I move into imaging at  longer focal lengths I want to expand my skills and take up drift alignment to get really accurate polar alignment for long exposure imaging.  Being the inquisitive type of person that I am I wondered if it was necessary.  I mean, let's quantify just how accurate is the all star polar alignment routine?  With the help of Ray Gralak's PemPro software I set out to do just that.  I also use the routine in this software for drift alignment.  It measures how far off the pole your mount is as well but it does it by tracking a star in the same method as a normal drift alignment.

So I setup the mount and did Celestron's All Star Polar Alignment, getting the alignment as close to perfect as possible before switching over to PemPro and its measurement tools.  So cut to the chase Mike, how well does it work??  My assessment is that it works really, really well.  Below are the screen shots taken of the azimuth and altitude measurements.  The azimuth in my official test was accurate to within 7.5 arc minutes and subsequent follow up tests have all been under 10 arc minutes of the pole.  The altitude axis was only .5 arc minutes off, which is understandable since that variable doesn't really change more than about 1/2 degree between my usual observing sites.  For long exposure and long focal length photographic use this is probably not close enough and a drift alignment is necessary to refine it even further.  However, for short focal lengths and wide angle imaging, it's quick and easy and better than is necessary.  For a visual observer, I don't think you'd even see any drift or rotation until several hours had passed on the same object.  My vote:  Celestron's All Star Polar Alignment is a really useful tool.  If your firmware has it, you should use it.  If it doesn't, you should upgrade your hand controller if it's possible.

All kinds of good things happening lately in my astro-land.  More on that next time though.

Mike

Greatest Astrophoto Ever!!!



My First Astrophoto - Dec 15, 2010



Feast your grubby little peepers on that ridiculously amazing piece of astronomy history right there to the left - The Greatest Astrophoto Ever Taken.  Enlarge it, print it out and save it so you can tell your granchildren about it and how you weren't there.  I will accept no argument in this discussion.  I have decreed it's the greatest ever, and thus it is so.  It's also the greatest one ever captured since because it's mine and it's my first.  Anyone who has ever taken up this fantastic hobby depraved obsession knows what I'm talking about.  Aesthetically and technically (let's not forget morally and emotionally too) the image is simply terrible.  Look at it.  It's a poorly color balanced, out of focus, partly trailed shot of the entire constellation of Orion.  But it's my first.  I still remember the rush after stacking up all those images and seeing something that looked sort of like stars and a little blur of M42 to go along with it.  That was one year ago today as I begin writing this.  As this day has approached I've been reflecting on how far I have come in many ways and how little I've learned in others. 

How it all started

In my professional life I've worked in a contract/consulting capacity for all of the last twelve years.  In that time I've spent an enormous amount of time on the road away from home working at client sites and kicking it in various hotels all over the United States.  At times it has been a major grind and trying on my family but it has been relatively lucrative and it provides a good life for my amazing family.  This was partially the reason that I gave up amateur astronomy back around 2005 - there simply wasn't enough time.  If I left my wife and girls to go out observing for a weekend I felt guilty for coming home from the airport and disappearing to the desert, only to reappear in a couple of days and head back to the airport.  Fast forward to 2010 and my girls are much older now - teenagers and beyond.  I had been itching to jump back into the astronomy game and I had always kept astrophotography on my list of things that I must do before I die.  At the time, I was still on the road every week - working in Las Vegas.  Since I've never been one to gamble and my Irish liver threatened long ago to defect to another nationality if I didn't give up drinking, life in Las Vegas was quite monotonous.  That's the real truth about my glamorous, rock star consulting lifestyle.  There are huge amounts of time where it's truly downtime and there's nothing to do.

I began to think about astrophotography and saw what other amateurs were able to do with a standard DSLR camera.  I had some Photoshop experience and realized pretty quickly that this could be the answer to my on the road boredom.  If I started in some astrophotography on the weekends, I'd have a bunch of data to crunch, process and massage into a new website that would undoubtedly be called the Mike Picture of the Day.  After I captured the greatest astrophoto ever (shown above), the hopeless addiction took hold and it's been a year of thoroughly enjoyable madness and thoroughly maddening joy.   



M45 - Captured with my Canon 60D piggyback
mounted on the CGEM mount.  This was the 3rd
image I captured.



I missed having a go-to telescope so I had this awesome plan where I would buy a CGEM 1100HD telescope for visual observing and also use it to begin dabbling in some piggyback astrophotography.  Dean at Starizona called Celestron directly while I stood there and secured the telescope for me and said it would be four or five days before it came from California.  I made plans to return the next weekend and pick up the telescope.  It was also during this visit that Dean suggested I should consider Hyperstar as a good way to get into imaging.  I was able to resist his suggestion for now - but that would change soon enough.  The next weekend saw the capture of my second astrophoto which was my first shot with a camera on a motor drive - piggybacked on the new CGEM mount. 



M42 Region captured with a telephoto lens



Imaging already dominated my thought process.  It had become like a drug and I spent great amounts of time trying to figure out where I was going to get my next fix.  I ended the year of 2010 by heading west into the Arizona desert for my first dark-sky imaging session to the Saguaro Astronomy Club's Antennas site.  Everyone else in the astronomy club had opted out of the weekend because of the extreme cold predicted in the weather forecast and the lack of shelter available.  I had been there before and thought, how bad can it be?  One other brave soul joined me - and he bailed on me because of the cold at about 10:00 pm.  I held on until about 2am, spending some time in my vehicle with the heater running while the camera did its thing outside.  I brought home a telephoto shot of the M42 region for my efforts.  I also realized that the 11" Edge HD optics were not going to be seeing any real use as a visual platform - imaging had stolen my affections.  If a 75-300mm zoom lens could give me this kind of result, what would happen if I put the 11" telescope itself to use? 

Enter the Hyperstar



Horsehead Nebula via Hyperstar
My first Hyperstar image - 32 x 2 minutes
with a Canon 60D at f/2



I ordered the Hyperstar in early January and waited impatiently.  Very, very impatiently for it to come.  It showed up at the end of January and I took a few exposures in the backyard just to familiarize myself with its use.  I didn't have the ability to autoguide at this point and knew that I wanted to go as deep as I could with my images anyway.  So when I returned to the Antennas observing site at the end of January, I took great care in making sure that I nailed down the most accurate polar alignment I could.  This was my "real imaging trip" and I put a lot of effort into planning.  I've since come to learn that this is a key to good astrophotography - planning and discipline.  I abandoned both for awhile with the expected results of bad astrophotos.  I planned to start with the showpiece objects - M42, The Horshead nebula region and the Rosette nebula.  I made a plan to shoot 32 exposures of each at 2 minutes per sub exposure at ISO 1600 with my Canon 60D.  As soon as the first frame of the first exposure of the Horsehead region downloaded to my screen, I made an audible and very un-Christian expression while hunched over my laptop on the observing field.  Completely blown away by the images I couldn't image often enough.  I spent every night while on the road soaking up knowledge.  I lived for a time on the Cloudy Nights imaging forum and I picked up Adam Block's Photoshop Tutorial DVD which I found to be extremely helpful and interesting.



NGC 5139 - Omega Centuari
32 x 45 Seconds @ ISO 1600 & f/2



I made plans in April to participate in my club's Messier Marathon - only I planned to image all 110 objects in one night via Hyperstar and hand in a DVD of completed images prior to leaving the observing field.  Well, nature had other plans.  Our Messier Marathon was pretty much clouded out.  In March I did a dry run to test all of the scripting that I had put together and was able to capture 71 Messier's before 2am.  Using Hyperstar I was able to capture and stack ten 30 second subs of each object which gave enough signal to noise to present some pretty nice images.  Like I said, the real marathon in April was clouded out but I managed to get a shot of Omega Centauri that I still think is my favorite astrophoto so far. 

The Dark Times

Soon, my thirst for knowledge and my insistence on pushing the envelope at ludicrous speed began to work against me.  I wanted to do everything and I wanted to do be doing it now.  This led to a series of equipment purchases that were just done too quickly.  I didn't really incorporate each new piece of imaging equipment into my overall workflow before I was trying jam in yet another piece. 

• March - I added a QHY5 camera and Kwiq Adapter from KW Telescope to begin autoguiding. 
• March - Upgraded to Maxim DL Pro to use the autoguider as part of my overall capture suite.
• April - Upgraded to a cooled CCD camera - a QHY8PRO from Astrofactors.
• May - Struggling with autoguiding, I'm back and forth between Maxim DL and PHD Guiding.  In the end I have discovered that they're both great products - that the user (me) is usually the problem. 
• June - In an effort to gain more weight capacity in the hopes of moving to imaging at prime focus I upgraded the mount to a used Celestron CGE.
• June - Thinking that the guidescope (my 9x50 finder) was the problem I added an 80mm f/7.5 guidescope.

All during this time I began to experiment with every form of technique you can think of - dithering, mosaics, plate solving, drizzle stacking, etc.  I learned how to do all of it in the most basic form of that phrase.  I didn't learn any of those techniques or my new equipment well though.  There were a handful of successful images, but by and large it has been a lot of frustration that has been documented pretty thoroughly in these pages over the last 6 months.  In that time I don't think that I've really improved my skills all that much and the ratio of good to failed images has been unacceptably low. 

Celebrating the first year

I wouldn't trade this first year for anything.  Overall, it's been a resounding success and has renewed my passion for astronomy in a way I didn't think was possible.  I've also learned that I need to take a step back and properly incorporate all of that equipment that I listed above - one step at a time.  I've documented the struggles that I've had over the last couple of months with my telescope mount here and here.  I've decided to take the equipment one piece at a time and really get it incorporated into the overall workflow before tackling another piece of the puzzle.  Yesterday I picked up my telescope mount from Ed Thomas at Deep Space Products after having a Hypertune service done.  Since Ed is local to me I was able to drop my mount off and pick it up when he was finished.  I haven't had a chance to thoroughly test the results, but the five minutes that I spent slewing it around last night showed that it seems to be vastly improved.  Stay tuned for a full writeup as I compare the new results to my old ones.  For now, suffice it to say that my experience with Ed so far has been nothing but positive.

Now that the mount is (hopefully) performing more up to its designed specification, I'll take the time to get the periodic error correction fully trained again as well as learning to drift align the mount.  If time permits, I may use this opportunity as well to try and quantify how well the Celestron All Star Polar Alignment routine performs in comparison to drift alignment.  I'll put PemPro through its paces for both periodic error and drift alignment.   Then I'll work to nail down the autoguiding to get truly round stars.  After that, who knows.  But stay tuned - it's sure to be even more fun than it's been already.  To close, here's my last astrophoto from my first year - another shot of M42.