Day 137 Wednesday 6th August Location of 67P as Rosetta arrives. Also autoguiding success with the new camera add on to SkyX with resulting images.

Wednesday

Aug062014

Wednesday, August 6, 2014 at 10:03AM

Rosetta arrival day at the comet.

I imaged the field of the comet but it is very faint - this faint dot is in exactly the right spot(2 dimensionally speaking) but the dot is in fact a star brighter than the comet itself. The comet was low in the sky with an Air Mass of 2.78 (20 degrees altitude) The predicted magnitude is 18.72.!

This deeper image from the Deep Sky Survey (not taken at 20 degrees altitude) shows the same star arrowed with even fainter stars around it. However the comet should brighten as it approaches the sun to bring it within my range.

This is the comet from Rosetta

Here are the Rosetta images in this animation.

This video explains it.

I managed to get the autoguiding working in the camera add on to the SkyX - assisted a little by Tom Bisque - by setting the camera to ST9XE and the autoguider to built in autoguider. This video shows the initial calibration process for the add on.

The process could not be more straightforward. Once calibrated all I had to do was slew to the object to be imaged - take a 4 second image as advised in the video using the autoguider chip and select a star and then click autoguide. It worked flawlessly every time.

Also I used the closed loop slew to ensure the object was centred. I did not even check! I simply slewed to the target,hit closed loop slew and it showed me before and after centreing images. Worked every time.

The advantage is that I can carry on tomorrow night without having to recalibrate - excellent!

This was my first guided image - a 2 minute exposure of M27