201409_OkieTex (7 images)

Click a picture to see a larger view.

These are images from the 2014 Okie-Tex star party held at Camp Billy Joe near Kenton, OK.

I don't mean it as an excuse, but, in a play on an old starting line, it was a dark and windy night... And the wind was a problem for my setup, which is an 8-inch Newtonian on a Celestron CGE, fairly tall for a portable rig. Last year I tried a windbreak with six foot tall walls, but the scope was still buffeted a lot, and this year I left the “skybox” home. That may have been a mistake. Quite a few shots were too blurred to use.

The other problems are akin to shooting myself in the foot. The first couple of nights I used a 2x barlow lens to double the magnification, and with the strong winds that also was a mistake. The image of M20 was the only barely usable one. With the 2x barlow, exposure times have to be much longer than without. I initially neglected to adjust my thinking for that when I removed it, and I severely overexposed a couple of images before I caught the error. The problems with that are that star colors and contrast are reduced markedly.

As partially noted above, the scope is an Astro Tech 8-inch f/4 imaging Newtonian reflector on a Celestron CGE mount. The imaging camera is a Canon 60Da, designed for astrophotography in that it is more sensitive than most to hydrogen-alpha light, a red that is strongly evident in some of these images. A Baader MPCC (Multi-Purpose Coma Corrector) was used to correct distortion in the edges of images acquired using a Newtonian telescope. Autoguiding was with an Orion 55mm guide scope, a Meade DSI-Pro-I camera, and PHDGuide software. My image acquisition software is Images Plus 5.75, which largely automates the collection of individual image frames, up to about 150 for IC342 below. Exposure times vary from five minutes per frame down to 20 seconds, depending on the setup and object of interest.

So. I live and learn. Here are the images. I hope you find them enjoyable.

Chuck Sterling, Las Cruces, NM