I haven’t written up my notes on this session yet, but I started trying some astrophotography, and that’s been taking some time and attention. It has taken almost a year to get the right combination of learning, confidence, and clear skies, but I finally got out with the astro camera I won at the Green Bank Star Quest 2018. It’s an Orion StarShoot Solar System Color Imager IV, and it doesn’t work with OS X above 10.10. So I had to partition my hard drive and reinstalled 10.8.5. Even so, it is a glitchy proposition. Nevertheless, I succeeded in taking a series of videos of Jupiter on 1 July and have been processing them into stacked photos with an old program called Lynkeos. It’s pretty easy to follow the steps. What is difficult is learning how to fiddle with the settings to maximize the results in the photo. I’m getting there.

So herewith are the three photos I have produced so far. They are stacks of about 350 images each, +/- 100. The images are from video taken between 22:30 and 23:18 EDT. I used the Celestron Nexstar Evolution 8″ SCT with a 2x Barlow lens. I did the stacking and initial processing in Lynkeos, as I mentioned, and finished the processing in GIMP. The first is larger because I processed it on my lappie while the other two were done on the desktop and the resolution settings were different. Haven’t really tracked down the exact cause.

So there. Now I’m an astrophotographer.

Description of the whole observing session to follow in a separate post.