NASA's Wise Sky images

[Djennings]

Hey everyone,

Seen this today and thought I would share. Pretty interesting photos from Nasa.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35445837/ns ... ginSlide=1

Enjoy,
David

[mamill]

Nice find, thanks Doug!

[Doug]

David,

Great link, thanks for sharing!

Doug

[Djennings]

Hi Doug and Mike,

Thanks, as I always enjoy checking out the Nasa photos and only dream of taking pictures with such quality. Even some of the archive photos are a pleasure to see. Speaking of which, I will have to write up this last Wednesday evening adventure I had while breaking out my gear for the first time in what seemed like forever. It's pretty funny now that I look back on it.

Clouds and chance of rain are abundant as usual here in Texas...

[Doug]

I was blessed with clear skies during the new moon! I got a couple of photos from that outing. I am almost ready to post them here. I still need to tweak the final image a little. Last Monday was my first time out since November! I found myself fumbling around trying to remember all the little thinks that make my setup "click". It's surprising how fast you forget these things.

[Djennings]

Hey Doug,
Oh, do I know all too well how that goes. I thought that I had it in my head how everything was suppose to work, ha! It took me over 2 hours to figure out why I could not locate Polaris in my Polaris scope. I remembered that I had to make sure the weight bar was down, I just forgot that the RA had to also be set to 90 degrees. I thought the red light and the etched glass was awful bright and was surprised that I could not see any stars, much less Polaris.

At first I thought it was the neighbors tree that might have been in the way, but nope that was not it. Soon realized that after I picked up the rig and moved it 5 feet the other direction and still could not locate that silly star. Got to thinking that perhaps, since it was awhile that I used the mount and even though it was wrapped up in a pillow case, as it was off the tripod that just maybe a spider had gotten in there and made a bunch of webs or something, so I decided to look and that is when I discovered the RA tube was in the way. DUH!

Then I figured that since I was now seeing Polaris, I could then get my 2 star alignment out of the way and perhaps get a picture or two taken. Well, as luck would have it, I started my first star alignment and looked up in the sky and wouldn't you know it, the stupid clouds were moving in, sigh! So.... 35 minutes later, as they managed to pass by, I thought ok, I am good to go now and finished my alignment, yeah!!!

Had plans to slew on over to M42 for a quick check on accuracy and was off just a bit but could still see it in the eye piece. Then I wanted to slew on over to the horse head and grab a few shots so off the scope went to IC434, so I thought. Could not find it and starting to get just a tad frustrated but then I thought to myself, what the heck, I will just center in on a bunch of stars what I thought was close by my target and see what I could come up with.

Started up my PHD and found a star to track, synced up and was tracking, things are looking up at this point. Then as luck would have it, I fired up the Maxim DL Essentials software, Camera showed idle, clicked on Focus and set it to 1 second and hit the button.

What came back was totally unexpected but seemed to follow suite for the evenings activities. I received an error indicating CCD Camera Error (412). Thought, hum... that is strange, never seen that before.

Well, by this time it was getting really late and I looked up at the sky and noticed that within 10-15 minutes, more clouds would be over head so it was time to pack it up and call it a night. Needless to say, after talking to Orion the next morning about the camera error I received, it indicated that it was a USB type of error on the laptop. Well, not completely satisfied with that answer I installed the software on my desktop and the camera and software worked just fine and actually I was happy with that because I was afraid the camera went tits up.

Next plan of attack was to investigate the laptop, installed/reinstalled drivers until my hair was falling out and still no go. So as I am typing this message, I am in the process of re-installing Windows on my laptop in hopes to get the USB drivers back to the same place they were when everything was working just fine. By the way, the laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1721 which had Vista installed, I removed that and placed XP Prof on it and there are many drivers that have to be installed after Windows is installed. The laptops hardware and XP do not like each other very much and don't play well together.

So, on your next evening out to shoot some pictures, just remember no matter how bad things may be, it could always be worse.