Night 11:
We tried to meet the challenge during this night but we just missed to
have both M31 and Pan-STARRS on the same picture. We only focused and
took the comet with the main telescope. Before that, we did a quick one
star alignment on Sirius. After taking the comet, we finished a two
stars alignment thanks to Mizar and added 4 calibration stars: Capella, Castor, Procyon and Arcturus. We tested the ''track and
accumulate'' function after the calibration of this last.
As the habit, we chose one point-like star and launched a 32 x 10s tracking and
accumulating session. But tracking failed and after some secondes gave
us a bad picture. So we decided to begin a good ''grab'' session of a
lot of celestial objects. We shot some galaxies, stars and two
clusters. Then we were tired by our big day and we decided to go to
sleep and woke up around 5 am to retry to take Pan-STARRS.
In the morning we quickly did a two stars alignment with Spica and Vega. Then we were
not lucky because my laptop died before we have the time to put the
comet in the main telescope.
Indeed, we were not able to get the coordinates in real time, thanks to Stellarium, anymore. So we tried
with M31 but it was not fruitful and we went back to sleep. I think
tiredness due to previous nights had an impact on our efficiency.
List of grabbed objects :
Stars: Antares
Comet: Pan-STARRS
Clusters: M44, M53
Nebulae and galaxies: M1, M31, M51, M58, M61, M64, M66, M83, M101, M106, NGC2264
Francois, the astronomer