Greetings all, This is my first blog "Stardate blah blah blah"

I have a Meade LX 200 8" Classic which is pretty much my first telescope, I have just started getting into the world of Astrophotography and decided to start a blog to aid in my journey.

Starting Kit...

1 Meade LX 200 8" Scope
1 Celestron NexImage CCD Camera *640 x 480
1 Meade Diagonal
1 Meade Barlow Shorty 2x
1 26mm Plossl Eye Piece
1 16mm Plossl Eye Piece
1 9.7mm Plossl Eye Piece
1 Laptop with Starry Night Pro 5.0
1 awesome Wife who tolerates my late nights :)

I also have a Sony Mavica CD 200 2.1mp Camera but for now I will concentrate on the above results only.

So here was my first image I took of Saturn out at Mansfield Dam on Friday.

It came out pretty Decent for my first attempt, but is a little fuzzy around the edges, however this is the first time I had ever seen the Cassini division for myself, which I thought was really cool.

I didnt get to the dam until about 11pm and most of the people had left, Except for ol' die hard Jeff, Jeff has the same model scope that I do but has the 10" version instead. His help is greatly appreciated as I have many starting beginner questions.


So last night I was told the seeing was good so I took my scope out early and let it cool down, did my alignment through Starry night which was a whole lot easier, and settle down with the ccd image of saturn on my screen. I took advantage of the down time while waiting for the scope to cool by tweaking the image capture settings, playing with the gain and the brightness and also the shutter speed, then as Saturn began to rise in the sky and the seeing got better I started taking some 120 second @15fps @1/30 shutter speed exposures.

This was the first image that came out.
This gave me great hope that tonight would be a good night for imaging and that I was on the right track with my tweakings.

I took a total of 7 different exposures and tweaked them all ever so slightly.

Then the sky cleared alot and the seeing got much much better, as well as I increased the gain a little so the image was brighter.

Here are the final two images that I have processed so far.





I found that when you stack the images in registax you have to then tweak the Wavelet properties in order to clarify and sharpen the image, the first time I did that I was so overawed with the discovery it was great! Finally I too could take excellent images.

My next step is to purchase a wedge for my scope which will greatly aid in my astrophotography as it allows my telescope to only track on one axis, keeping the image steady and rotated. I also plan to get a second decent Barlow lens @2.5x magnification which I can stack on top of my 2x Barlow now and have a total of 5x magnification (eventually I will get a Televue powermate 5x) but for cost and starting a simple barlow will be great.

Well more next time with the Adventures of Marslauncher aka John Cooke