TAS visits Jack Netwon
In leiu of our canceled Star Party six members of the Tallahassee Astronomical Society went to Jack Newton's FLIC (Florida Imaging Center) to learn CCD imaging.
Friday night was a complete washout because of the weather. Saturday started out looking bad but cleared up just after lunch. During the day Saturday we watched Jack take a shot of the sun (see the bottom of the page), looked at Venus, Jupiter, Capella and Mercury through the 16" in broad daylight. Jack noted we should be able to see Venus with the naked eye. It only took sighting along the scope, failing to sweep the sky with binoculars and about 15 minutes to find it at 4:30 in the afternoon, in complete daylight with the naked eye.
That night we divided into two groups. Group one consited of
Shawn Moore, Ern Jones, Greg Mizell and Group 2 of Gene Kochanowsky, Joe Haley, Dennis Dye.
One group started off with a 12" Meade LX200 and a Meade Pictor 416XTE CCD and the other using a Meade 16" LX200 and a Meade Pictor 1616XTE. We switched off halfway through the night. Most of the photos below are from the 16", the tracking seemed to hold longer on it. We used The Sky to direct the scopes and MaximDL for the actual photography and image processing.
Dennis gave me a great shot of just
Jack and the scopes we used in the roll off observatory and some photos from his first trip.
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