Thursday, June 26, 2008

Pluto

Tried to find Pluto last night.
It's very low on the horizon and I have to try and capture in between my house and next doors. I used my scopes GOTO, which was aligned before I started, and the scope tracked right down between the houses.
Using a 40mm EP I could see some very faint stars, but I didn't have a clue which one was Pluto. So I used my DMK camera to take some before and after pictures. I only had a limited time before my house obscured the view, so I don't think it was long enough to tell, using blink comparator between the images.
Also, I wasn't even sure that it was on the chip. Below is a processed image from about 20 x 5 sec framed AVI.
Next time I'll use the Canon DSLR, this will give me a wider field of view.
Another problem is finding star charts that go down to +13.9 magnitudes.