Lunchtime Photo – Kevin Drum

I headed out to the desert on Saturday with the promise of good, cloud-free skies. Ha. As I drove east, I could see huge black thunderheads covering half the Mojave Desert, so I stopped to check things out. The normal weather report said everything was clear. Uh huh. Then I looked at a Doppler radar map, and it showed a few scattered clouds and nothing more.

So I forged on, hoping the clouds would break. They didn't. There was no point in setting up the telescope, so instead I took out my regular camera and diddled around for a while with the Milky Way and the clouds. By the time I was done, I could see lots of stars, so I set up the telescope after all.

And it was great! A couple of weeks ago I adjusted the backlash on my mount, and it turned out I didn't really have any. I made a slight adjustment, but figured it wouldn't make much difference.

But it did. For the first time in forever, I did a successful calibration, and even with a longish exposure time (five minutes) the guiding was good and the stars were excellently round. Because of one thing and another I only got about three hours of imaging time, which is too bad, but things turned out OK anyway.

This is the Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635, and it's pretty easy to see why it's called that. Unfortunately, my camera didn't resolve the lovely blue color of the bubble itself, but that's a normal problem. I may try this again to see if I can do better.