22:45:00 -Sunday Night

First ‘Fall’ night of the year; cool, crisp, dry air.

-I just HAD to get out even though I’m pretty tired after this weekend and have to get up early for work tomorrow. I was planning on a simple observing night, just some binoculars and an adirondack chair, but the moon looked so cool I just couldn’t resist doing a little imaging. I got some great crisp images of the Moon then thought, ‘eh.. what the heck… let’s try something else while I’m out here.’ M57 is practically directly overhead so I tried a widefield view. It’s ok but I wanted a little more detail so I tried my eyepiece adapter to try and get a more “zoomed-in” image (smaller field of view). My telescope needs its quarterly aligning very badly so I’ve spent the last hour plus trying to get the object centered and still no luck!

I’m disappointingly calling it a night…

(UPDATE) -Here’s the image I ended up getting this night after some processing:

MOON_2014_09_07