First Day Time Shots
14 March, 2000

 

First Night Shots of Moon
24 March 2000

Moon at terminator. The image appears to "tear" horizontally, low and to the left in the image. Is this blooming? Some shades of gray, but generally over exposed.

No shades of gray. Greatly overexposed. Blooming artifact in the upper right.

High contrast. No shades of gray. Greatly over exposed. Blooming artifact top centre.

Second Night Out
25 March, 2000

First, found the focus for this image by trial and error using the CCD camera only. Later, temporarily replaced the CCD camera with a 25 mm eye piece but did not tighten the set screw. The eye piece was slid in and out by hand until the correct focus position was determined. This point was marked on the eye piece barrel with a piece of electrical tape so that the the position corresponding to the rough CCD focus could be found later.


 

 

To test the electrical tape mark on the eye piece barrel, took the telescope way out of focus. A metal ring with a set screw was placed at the position on the barrel marked by the electrical tape. The telescope was refocused using the eyepice constrainted in position by the metal ring.

A dark filter was added to the barrel of the CCD. Some minor focus tweaking then produced this image.

The focus is not perfect, and the exposure is still not right, but an improvement over the first night's effort...