6/11/04 M13 The great Hercules Cluster

My firend Dave Snay came over with his LX90 for some imaging and some observing on a very clear but turbulant night. I'd have to say the light weight and excellent optics of the LX90 make it a fine scope for travel. Dave has some nice eyepieces too so it was fun to do some observing. M13 was straight up so I decided to go after it with the LX200. I had actually taken some self guided 3minute exposures with the ST8 a few days prior and got the color with 1 minute unguided shots on this night. As Dave and I noted during the session, guiding / tracking is much harder at the zenith, but the seeing is so much better. The image shows some slight guiding issues, but overall not too bad. M13 is a bit south in this image because of the location of my guide star. I use CCDSoft for guiding and camera control and it requires that the camera be orthogonal with the forks on the scope. This is not a requirement for the MaximDL/CCD software, so if I was using that I could rotate the camera around to find a better guide star while keeping the image centered. I just haven't sucked it up and spent the $400 for a copy