Walter's LogBook
	Fri/Sat August 6/7, 1999

It was a nice summer night, so I set up on the front porch in Oshawa and tried my hand at some solo CCD imaging. There were a couple of street lights that were bothersome, but I was set up in front of the house for maximum convenience, not for dark skies. My goal was to keep things as simple as possible -- minimal polar alignment, no commuting, no guiding, and minimal image processing.

I was using the Starlight Xpress MX512, a 12-bit B&W CCD camera. As I soon discovered, my LX200 doesn't track very well, so I stick to very short (5 second) exposures. Later, I discovered that the scope was out of balance in RA, something I'll have to make sure doesn't happen again. Hopefully a proper balance job and perhaps some LX200 SmartDrive training will allow me to do 30-second unguided exposures in the near future.

The four pictures that follow certainly don't compare to Jack Newton's (or a lot of other peoples!). On the other hand, I'm already ahead of what I was able to do with old-fashioned film-based prime focus astrophotography! And it took hardly any effort at all.

These pictures were acquired and added together using MaxIm DL/CCD software. Other than adding the pictures together and stretching them, no special processing was done.

M15	30 seconds (6 x 5s)
Looks like I need at least 1 minute for M15...

M2	1 minute (12 x 5s)
Looks like I need 2 minutes for M2...

M27	5 minutes (60 x 5s)
Looks like I need 10 minutes or more for M27...

M57	3 minutes (36 x 5s)
OK, I should have re-focused first for this one...