Catching rocks
I aligned my ‘scope on Saturday night, and a sorry and long time I had of it. As soon as I put the camera on the ‘scope the alignment began to drift again – the counterweights I set up a while back are insufficient for the arrangment with the Canon, and I hadn’t checked to be sure that nothing had changed. My head hurts, and there’s a dent in the observatory wall. ‘Nuff sed.
I noticed as I was playing with Starry Night that a small asteroid named Tolosa was passing by Mars, so I decided to try to catch a glimpse of it as it was going by. Tolosa was so close to Mars in the sky that glare was a problem—the planet and the asteroid were in the same field—and I took several 30-second and 3-minute exposures over the space of about half an hour. There’s nothing spectacular about this, but I was satisfied with the night’s work. In the frame below, Tolosa is circled, and identifiable stars are marked with their supposed magnitudes. Tolosa is a broken streak since the image is a composite of several individual images, and there was a brief period when no images were taken.
The colour of the background glow is in part due to the use of a Lumicon Deep Sky filter (amazing what’s in the bottom of your eyepiece box when you look hard). The filter cuts through the pollution, but I found it impossible to remove the colour cast it gave to the image, which was more or less possible without the filter. I won’t be using it for further colour work but it’s perfectly adequate for black and white.