After getting back to using my Astrotrac at the club’s Haw Wood star party I decided I’d like to do some more of the same at Kelling. There was an ulterior motive as well; since building and setting up the observatory there’s rather more work involved in stripping it all down to take into the field.
Once committed to the Astrotrac the choice of lens was made. The Canon 75-300 zoom works really well at shorter focal lengths and is ideally suited to unguided imaging with the Astrotrac. The camera was my QHY9 which had to be removed from it’s permanent home on the back of the Tak.
Once the sun set on Friday evening the sky cleared quite nicely, rather hazy with a lot of moisture but better than a lot of the skies we’ve had this year. As my pitch was completely over-hung with trees I negotiated with a neighbour for a corner of theirs. Once setup, Cygnus was close to the zenith so I started there aiming the red-dot finder between Deneb and Sadr taking some short exposures and then re-framing. Once done, I set a sequence of 5 minute exposures and left the Astrotrac to do it’s thing for the remainder of it’s 2 hour tracking time.
Once that had completed I moved the setup along the Milky Way towards Lacerta aiming for the dark nebula B168. The procedure was repeated and then, finally I moved to Auriga. By this time two things were apparent; 1) The skies were closing down and 2), after a week at work I was ready for bed so I cut this session short and headed for the van. Packing up with the Astrotrac consists simply of splitting it into parts small enough to fit in the van and stowing them in the cab in front of the seats.
So, just one night of imaging this time but rather more hours than we got at Haw Wood. That’s just the way it goes.