It was a lovely moon here last night and it's one of the few things we can really study in these parts. Every building seems to be lit up like it's Christmas! Anyways, I've been an on-off amateur astronomer for over 10 years. Still using trusty Meade cheapo 4.5" reflector.
It's been gathering dust for about 8 years but recently I was a bit inspired by studying cosmology (obviously this is fairly irrelevant to amateur optical astronomy but logic is never a big factor in desire). When I took out the scope last week the images I was getting using the equally ancient Philips Toucam were pretty manky. So I re-collimated it: what a trial that was. I used a Cheshire collimator. SO I conquered my fear and I think I now have offset collimation which seems to work well. Stars are now points rather than smears on the CCD. Too much turbulence to see the Airey disc. Magnification with the Toucam is absurdly large. Just right for planets though - I think the sensor is a good match to the angular resolution. But I'm looking for a bigger CCD sensor for wider field observations. I've included my first processed CCD image. Captured and stacked with K3CCD Tools. Used Paintshop Pro 8 to do some unsharp masking. I just spent about half an hour on it so I'm pretty sure it could be better. I love the way the craters light up on the limb.
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