Posted in Observation Log on March 20th, 2009 by Northwest Astro
So, a couple days after getting the shot of M81 and M82, I took the scope out again to experiment with shooting M81 by itself through the LX200. Although I made a couple mistakes. First, I shot on the day after full moon, and second, I ran shorter exposures on the LX200 than I did with the Orion and the widefield shot. Some napkin math tells me I should have upped the exposures to 9 minutes from 5, but I was trying 2 minute exposures instead. So the end result is that I got pretty much nothing for my hour of exposure time.
But, determined to not let the clear night go to waste, I turned the scope to the moon, and tried out a polarizing filter I picked up awhile back. I knew a lot of people swore by these things, but I didn’t quite expect what I was able to see. I saw quite clearly, all the gradients in the surface of the moon. The sort of things you can usually only make out on a super-saturated photograph. I thought I saw color, but at the same time, it could have been false color introduced by the filter. I’ll have to try it again to know for sure.
I also noticed Saturn was up for the first time since I got the LX200, so I pointed the scope at it as well. With the ETX-125 that I had previously, I only ever saw Titan next to Saturn when I was at home. At a dark site, I was able to pick up a second moon (never knew which one). The first thing that jumped out to me was that I could see 5 moons. My collimation was off, but I could make out the gap between the rings and the planet, and 4-5 different bands across the planet itself. More detail than I had ever seen of the planet to date. I’ll definitely have to revisit Saturn later and try some planetary imaging again.
