Day 54 Setting up my old MX916 camera.
Sunday, April 6, 2014 at 5:11PM A clear night with the Moon at a 46% phase to the South West.
I set up my ETX90 plus my old MX916 CCD Camera. My aim is to mount this onto the 4 inch refractor on the CGEM and use it for spectroscopy. The MX916 was connected in line to the ETX with a 32mm eyepiece in the right angle position to use with the flip mirror. As it was just getting dark I used the finderscope to align the ETX on the bright street lights down towards Garrucha. I then centralised a light in the eyepiece and then flipped the mirror to use the CCD camera. I adjusted the focusing to bring the street light in focus. When it was dark I went throught he same process using Mizar as the target. I was able to focus the CCD camera fairy easily. I used CCDSoft (which I had set up on my netbook pc (uns and eventually runs out so the programme crashes. The software for the camera seems not to run on anything later than XP so I cannot use my laptop.
This is Sky and Telescope's Sky Week. No eclipse for us in Europe though!