Mount testing

The great LX850 experiment is complete. I kept the mount significantly longer than usual, which should be interpreted as a hint that I liked it. It performed as expected every time I used it over a period of 2 1/2 years. I captured plenty of images. Now it’s time to move on. In this case, it is really time to move over.  I don’t want to commit to any particular astronomy activities. I’ll put one of the other mounts in the observatory and do some casual DSLR work as time and interest permit, but probably nothing worth writing about. Instead, I’ll be using this blog space to talk about homebrewing because that is what interests me now. I may preserve the astronomy posts in one blog and transfer the brewing posts into a separate blog, or I may leave them combined here. The new URL is www.allminebrewery.com but for now that just takes you here.

crab

 

I guess I’m still in a bicolor rut, but at least I got away from the widefield stuff. Here’s M1 with eight ten minute exposures each Ha and OIII. Working at F/8 instead of F/5 is about one aperture stop decrease, so Ideally I’d be doubling exposure time.  I lack the patience so I’m still using 10 minute exposures. Click the thumbnail above for the larger version, or click here for less compressed.