How an interest became an Obs..

My wife was given a 114mm Vixen Newtonian by her father who knew that she was interested at looking at the night sky. As aligning the telescope takes some effort I was asked to deal with that, as a result you hang about when observing starts and one night I saw the rings of Saturn......

The roles are distinctive in our astronomical marriage, My wife likes the deep sky stuff, faint and fuzzy. While I like the imaging side of things, technology and making as much as possible myself.

The bits

CCD camera

Logitec Vesta in a custom housing
cannon 10D

Gear list

150mm Helios refractor on an EQ4 mount
10 mm plosel
20mm plosel
2x Barlow
1.25" to T adaptor and visa versa
camera adaptor
canon EOS T ring
remote cable and pod for long canon 10D exposure
direct PSU connection for 10D

The Results:

Web cam:

first light

a few hours later of adjusting

And then what started it all

Canon 1Ds

Venus transit, with added extra

Venus transit

Canon 10D

Venus transit, possibly with some sunspot activity (yes and dust)

LA visit 04

during our visit in LA Tom Heffron kindly carted us around with his excellent gear to watch some stars.
We started out on Mnt Pinos, which had unbelievable clear skies, the milky way was easily visible.

focus was found to be difficult, on a learning curve here.

So the moon then

unfortunately snow on the mountain and wind chilled us down very fast so we abandoned that site.

So we went back to LA and as Saturn was to be up in an hour, why not set up there. nothing lost but time. The seeing was bad and thus Saturn was a blob. but other things where visible. Orion

Dec 04, just after the observatory was assembled we had a clear night, and as the mount is not fitted yet decided to use the tripod and 10D with 28-135.