For most of my time doing Astrophotography I have done my imaging at night, with my family sleeping nearby, in the comfort of a room with AC/Heat or a Car, and normally watching a movie or playing a game... using a red light not really a concern cause most likely I'm not imaging when I use my phone flashlight to check on the scope...
Now that I'm back in Texas I decided to join the Austin Astronomical Society to connect with other people of like interests and learn and experience astronomy from others. My first opportunity was attending the April 15 Star Party at Pedernales Falls State Park. I couldn't get out there until just before dark so I missed a lot of the socializing and BBQ... in fact I literally walked up as they were taking a group photo. Knowing no one I stood on the side of the image and smiled. I parked my car in the parking lot as I didn't know the protocol for using vehicles on the grid and a Tesla tends to turn on a lot of lights when you just walk by... last thing I wanted was to be the FNG that ruined peoples night vision every 15 mins.
I was using my travel scope setup, this time using an ASI Air Plus to control the setup, a little lighter and the Eagle 4 is going to be used in the observatory in PR. Setup was quick and after doing some tweaks to the tracking settings and reseting calibration I was ready to go. Being as it is galaxy season and the 275mm of focal length of the Radian Raptor 61 doesn't have the reach out and image something power that the Edge HD 11 does (2800mm) I needed a target... well I was being social at the star party so why not be social on the target as well... It looked like I could get a nice framing on the Markarian Chain of Galaxies. I setup 5 min exposures and targeting 10 images per filter and let it do its magic.
Now that the scope was processing its plan I decided to walk around, being it was already dark it was hard to see were the other setups were, I checked out the 25" Dobsonian that is the club scope, didn't look through it cause there were some other people in line and I was more interested in finding some other astrophotographers. I met a handful of people, another fellow star party newbie with an ED102 using an ASI Air imaging the M51 Whirlpool galaxy, an older gentleman with a Celestron C8 that was working on his tracking and one gentleman that had an old scope from the late 70s that had modified a wedge and was attempting to image the Orion Nebula. The father and son duo at the end of the night had a nice HyperStar setup on the C9.25 and that beautiful CEM70 mount was good to talk to and share my setup with. It was great getting to see people of all skill levels out there working through to process of capturing data.
The club has a lot of visual astronomers, most of them with big dobsons and while I sat there and looked at my subs I had to chuckle about a video Dillion O'Donnell did about smudges as he played an April Fools joke saying he was going visual. It's pretty amazing the level of knowledge the Visual Astronomers know about targets and finding them in the sky even using the limited imaging devices we call eyeballs. I have some mad respect to them for what they do, however because of the effects of mid-life eyeballs that have had PRK surgery on them 20 years ago (talk about star diffraction spikes) my best bet is to stick to reading glasses and iPads to look at sub-exposures.
Overall it was a good experience, I will most definitely do it again but one thing I plan on doing is show up before it gets dark and meet people so I can remember their faces... at this point if they were in a police lineup they would need to have their scopes next to them :D. In the end, I captures some additional frames on each of the filters and ended up with 4.5 hours exposure time on the Markarian Chain... Think it turned out pretty nice. Not a lot of color to them but hey, they are a long ways away and I had a small little scope. I think last night when I was viewing the sub-frames I counted 17 different galaxies in the image.
As I was processing the data the next morning my 10 year old decided to make lunch for us... In honor of my galaxy picture she made some galaxy muffins... Its amazing with a bag of pancake mix, cream cheese, sugar and sprinkles combined with the imagination of a child can produce.
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