The forecast did not look great for planetary imaging, but being anxious to start getting ready for the planets as the come to opposition over the next four months, I put the Meade on the mount today and set it up with the ASI178MC for OSC captures of the moon.

The Moon

Seeing was horribly bad, but that could have been because I was shooting over the roof of the cottage. I have been wanting to capture OSC data on the Littrow Valley just after sunrise, but I think that capturing the Moon at this phase is always going to be difficult due to its low placement and relative to the cottage. Maybe I’ll have to settle for a capture when the Moon is just one day older.

There was no dew or surface winds during this part of the session.

Since I would be losing the moon behind the cottage rather quickly, I needed to start shooting before the sky was dark enough to support a polar alignment. Expecting this and knowing that I had left polar alignment in a bad state the last time that I tried working on guiding, I got the best smartphone alignment that I could while I was changing scopes. It turned out to be pretty good. There was very little drift for me to manually guide out.

Setup, start up, and target acquisition all went smoothly. I noticed some backlash in Ra when the scope would appear to keep moving at the end of a slew. I think that Dec is pretty good.

I ran captures on Littrow Valley, the Theophilus/Cyrillus/Catharina crater triplet, Smirnov Dorsa, Crater Proclus and Mare Crisium, Craters Hercules and Atlas, and the north polar region.

The initial look at the data suggest that I will not be able to do much with it.

The Planets

I put the ASI290MM on the scope for capturing planets and cam back inside at 1030.  I set an alarm for 0145, but I almost didn’t wake up. I was outside before 0200, and it was cloudy. I checked again at 0300 with the same result, so I shut down and went inside for the night.