DBK-21 first light

Last night I was hoping to try out the new DBK-21 cam on Jupiter and maybe catch some Perseid meteor shower action as well. I setup right before dark, and perhaps a little too hastily. GOTO performance was not very good, worked well at first but had some issues later in the evening. Some were good, others well not so much. I attribute that to targets being on the meridian. not too familiar with how this affects EQ observing, but it seemed to have an effect last night. At any rate, I setup and in my boredom, decided to try to image Uranus. I knew not to expect any detail, so believe it or not I am actually happy with the following image of the little blue dot. Imaged at 0542ut, this is a process of 50 frames, stacked, aligned, and RGB alignment in registax v6. C8 on Sirius EQ-G. No barlow. DBK-21 camera from Imaging Source.

Uranus, 0542ut C8/DBK21

I continued to play around with different targets, suffering some way off GOTO performance. Still not sure what all that was about, but I did not pay proper diligence to my normal setup. Was pretty rushed with it.

I was pretty stoked to see Jupiter rise above my eastern obstructions around 0245 local. I had started to dial in the settings on the camera when a cloud bank rolled in. I didn't even get to capture one .avi sequence. One thing was pretty apparent is that the uv/ir cut filter required for this camera is extremely critical on Jupiter. Color was obviously skewed, but there was a hazy halo around the entire planet that was very distracting. I am assuming that was IR light washing out the edges. I will have to order a good uv/ir blocking filter. I will try again next week though. Somewhat pissed that I had waited so long for Jupiter and the height of the Perseid meteor shower only to be clouded out, I decided to pack it in. To add insult to injury, it started raining so I had to do a very fast breakdown. No harm done, but hopefully next week I will have better results to post up.