After a long run of cloudy nights a clear one was well overdue, and I was on standby, ready and waiting to get out there to try out the replacement Baader Hyperion 3.5mm eyepiece.
The skies southwards were clear, but the Moon in Virgo meant that there was a lot of glare down the scope OTA when viewing Saturn. That, coupled with the poor seeing (warm day, cold night etc. etc.) meant that imaging was always going to be a low-quality affair. Indeed, the conditions were too bad for viewing at 3.5mm (x285 mag), so I had to settle for 8mm (x125 mag) on the zoom, which is fast becoming my favourite eyepiece.
Anyway, I managed to get a fair batch of .avi files of Saturn and of parts of the Moon before condensation set in and covered the scope mirrors, terminating the observation session.
It'll take me a while to plough through the imaging data getting rid of the bad frames using VirtualDub, but for now here's a 30-second loop of the bottom edge of the Moon, as captured with the SPC900 webcam, to give you some idea of just how wobbly the view gets when the seeing is poor:
Just in case you were wondering what's what, here's the key:
If I get any half-decent images out of the mass of video data, I'll post them tomorrow.
THE SMALL(ish) PRINT... (updated 23/07/2016)
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