Jeff's Blog

Camp Highroad got a little beat up from that concert. The sky was 100% clear the entire night, just super nice. Dew got a little heavy – I was running 4 straps, 2 per scope and killed 2 28AH Duracell Powerpack 600 batteries with just those.

M45 came out ok. I need to put more time on it, from much darker skies. It rises right through the Leesburg light dome at CHR.

I spent the past two nights at Sky Meadows State Park here in VA grabbing some photons with the AT8RC. Simply a beautiful site to say the least. My wife and I got married here in 2007. Here’s my usual setup with the AT8RC, CGE-Pro mount, and Parsec 8300M CCD camera.

The view south:

The view north:

The old house:

Another shot of my setup:

AT72ED guidescope and Lodestar guidecam mounted piggyback on the AT8RC. Until I have an observatory this is the best portable setup I’ve found. Eventually I’ll be going off-axis with a rotator:

Here’s 320 minutes (5 hours and 20 minutes) of the Bubble Nebula/NGC7635 from the two nights combined:

I hate those Chinese made dual screw extension tubes, and I didn’t like the way the Lodestar was gripped by the 1.25″ one at the end of the chain.

So, I bought both of these pieces:

http://www.scopestuff.com/ss_c2bf.htm

And this:

http://www.astronomytechnologies.com/product.asp?id=17012&c=0

I had a 2″ long 2″ extension (2 screw, brass compression ring) already, forgot where I got it, so here’s the full chain now. Much more rigid than before. Here’s the Lodestar screwed directly onto the c-threads of the first piece. Then I screw my Lumicon 1.25″ IR-cut filter inside that one and add the 2nd 1″ extension:

Then I slide the above directly into the 80mm extension, and clamp down, then into the smaller extension, clamp down on that, then into the AT72ED’s drawtube. Done.