Walter's LogBook
	Wed/Thu August 18/19, 1999

My seventh night of imaging on the front porch in Oshawa. The sky was cloudy around sunset but then cleared (forecast was for variable clouds tonight). So I set up the scope and decided to go after NGC 6946 in Cygnus, as it was passing near the zenith.

I set everything up and went to Deneb to focus. After getting a good focus, I went to NGC 6946 and took an image. It was out of focus! In the course of slewing the scope from Deneb to 6946 (about 15 degrees), the mirror had shifted! Aaaarg!

It was then that I took advantage of a new weapon in my arsenal of techniques. Just the day before I had worked my way through the LX200 Alignment Star Catalogue and wrote the star numbers into the index chart of my Sky Atlas 2000. With this in hand, I could choose a bright star even closer to 6946 than Deneb. I chose star #235, alpha Cephei, which is just 6 degrees away. It worked! After slewing to 6946, the focus was still sharp!

Having to re-focus turned out to be a very good thing. As it happens, I achieved my best focus ever, about 1½ x 1 pixels FWHM! Wow! Up until now I thought that 2½ x 2 was about as small as I could go. I guess being so near the zenith didn't hurt. As evidence of my good focus, I present the screen-grab from the MaxIm Inspect window.

Of course, Murphy is never very far away in astronomy. No sooner had I achieved this great focus and taken my very first 30-second image of 6946 then the cloud rolled in over top of my field! I couldn't help that Cassiopeia stayed clear for the next half hour. After that though, the whole sky was completely socked in. And that was the end of that!

Now, of course, the moon is rocketing across the sky, well on its way to reducing the available dark-sky time to zero. But I'll still be going out, just to see what can be done with a CCD from the city at full moon. Perhaps it will still be possible to get some decent globular shots...