Friday, February 5, 2021

	Location:	Tierra Del Sol
	Weather:	Cool, clear, moonless
	People:	Two imagers on the public pads (Bill Richards with a new Esprit 100 and a guy with a C8 on a Skywatcher EQ6, camper van), bumped into Ed Rumsey at the warming hut.
	Equipment:	the WO80 and the Quantum 120ED; EZ-Touch, AVX, camera gear
	Goals going in:	First (dark) light for the Quantum, do some side-by-side with the WO80. Maybe snap some wide fields.

Summary (equipment)

Set up the 120 and the 80 on the EZ-Touch to do some side by sides. My previous observing (at Jon's) was with the WO80 vs the AR102 that I had just acquired as part of the AVX mount package. Had to sell one. (the scopes essentially tied on M42, so for wider, higher and more transportable, the WO won handily). On M42, M46 & M47, views were much brighter in the 120, which is to be expected. Good pair.

Summary (observations)

Started with Orion Nebula, eyeballed over to M46 and M47. Planetary visible with averted. Star fields looked good. M44. Swept to Double Cluster and the Owl Cluster (ET Cluster). Swept to M81, M82. Did not impress me the way they did at Mammoth (I was able to see them with averted at home a couple of nights prior). Got the Nexus working for a while, but the encoder cable kept popping out. Did see the Eskimo Nebula. No detail. Could not find the Leo Triplets after Leo was up.

At this point I decided to set up the AVX. Rough aligned it to Polaris and set it to Last Alignment. Popped the camera with the 16-55mm on it. Had no idea of scale. After a couple of successful (focused) shots, I put the 70-200 on and soon enough was shooting at 200mm. Reasonably good stuff. Currently capped at 30sec exposures, need to see if I can go deeper that that. Images limited by focus rather than tracking, which was a surprise. 200mm with APS-C is roughly Orion's Belt to the Nebula.

Framed Andromeda by dead reckoning, wide field shot, then panning around with imaging until I found it, then imaging and centering. Two shots to find, but ultimately a camera mounted on a scope - to find the dim stuff without guide stars around it - would speed things up (also, just better to have a visual capability).