Last night (17th May) was a beautiful clear night with a nicely placed crescent Moon so I jumped to it and captured this using my newly acquired SkyWatcher 130PDS.
Rewind a few weeks..... My good friend Al decided to sell his mount and 130PDS after a rather unfortunate accident which broke the focuser mechanism (he has recently posted here about his new adventures with the SkyWatcher Star Adventurer and soon to be revealed new scope - watch this space!)
So I bought it off him with an optimistic view to fixing it, but it was all an unknown. I duly dismantled the focuser to find a shattered bearing which held the crayford focuser. A quick web search and a parcel later, all was working again.
Whilst I was waiting for the bearing to arrive I decided to give the scope a good service and clean and also to flock the inside of the tube, which helps to give a better contrast and to reduce stray light.
All re-assembled I had a few minutes of frustration with the collimation but all was good in the end.
This was also my first use of the excellent program AutoStakkert! which takes a video file and enables you to use the best frames to create the final image. (Thanks to Dylan O'Donnell for his tutorial.)
SkyWatcher 130PDS
Altair Hypercam 183C Pro
SkyTech LPRO Max filter
25 (best) of 100 frames from video file
Processed in AutoStakkert! and Affinity Photo
Clear skies
MJ
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