The new Coronado PST has arrived!

I recently ordered a Coronado PST and has arrived.What a incredible little 40mm scope this is .Being only 15 inches long it is extremely sturdy being made of aluminum it is going to serve my purpose very nicely.Arriving by UPS (United parecel Service) I tore into the box like a child at Christmas.I was so excited I couldnt wait to give it a test drive.So grabbing the camera tripod I quickly set the tripod and away I went.My first reaction was of sheer disbelief.A stunning image of our sun with a obvious solar prominence on the eastern limb and a solar filament shaped like a horseshoe in the area of the new sunspot formation.With a bit of tweaking of the tuner,I was able to bring out some granulation on the surface.

Having mounted the scope on a tripod,I had a bit of trouble keeping the sun centered in the eye piece.Not because of the suns drift across the sky but,because the scope was a bit heavy for tripod.If weather permits ,I am going to attempt to piggyback it on my big scope and catch some shots which I will be sharing very soon.

Jupiter and her moons

It has been quite a while since my last posting.As always,I blame the weather but,also I have been quite busy working so putting the whole guilt on Mother nature just doesn’t seem right.We have had a decent stretch of clear skies these past few days and needed to get reaquainted with my scope.Even though with a full moon washing out the sky I did manage a few shots of Jupiter.Actually,I took about 70 images  of which only a few came out good.I have my new laptop with…ugh…windows Vista to run the DSI and it worked out pretty good.Sadly though,I can’t run the LPI which takes much better images of planetary objects (my opinion) due to some compatibility issue with Vista.If the skie cooperate,I may try to image Jupiter again tonight using my other Laptop.

The skies last night were a bit turbulent at the start of the session but,soon settled down with only a slight breeze.Their was a bit of humidity that caused dew to settle on the scope as the temps dipped to the upper 40s F.Observing went quite well until the full moon began to washout the sky.So,as you could imagine even with a hot cup of java I was chilled to the bone.