Tried some autoguiding again tonight but the clouds started rolling in. Plus the street lamp is just no fun so I’m going to try it at a darker site. Also did some imaging of Jupiter with the Meade LPI. Here’s the best shot… you can barely distinguish the atmospheric bands and the little blobs (left to right) are the moons Ganymede, Io, Europa, and Callisto.

Tried autoguiding for the first time last night. We first polar aligned the scope (not as well as I’d like but I didn’t need to get it perfect for what I wanted to try). I then used the Meade LPI camera connected to GuideDog software from barkoSoftware to keep the scope centered on a star. I mounted the Canon 300D on top of the scope and snapped some shots (of whatever dark patch of sky I could find). It was really a bad night for pictures (3/4 full moon, clouds, haze, you name it) but for the first time in all our attempts, the picture came out relatively sharp.

On a clearer night and with more precise preparation, I think this should could come out a lot better — I’m hoping to try to capture a nebula or something like that next time. I posted the shot here that turned out best.

Went out 2 nights ago but there was a lot of haze — it was the clearest night we’ve had in 2 weeks.  I had recently gotten the Meade LPI camera, a cheapo camera for planetary imaging.  I was using it primarily to calibrate the drive gears on the scope.  I will also use it to do periodic error correction (PEC) which corrects for inherent gearing problems with all scopes but I need to do that when the scope is on the wedge (another night).  We did try taking some shots of Jupiter but the haze was bad.  We capped the night by just doing some observing of the moon and tracking down craters with a moon atlas.