CCD Notes July 26-27, 2005 Connelly's Springs, NC. Another Day, Another Globular. Messier 3. Same scale as yesterday's M13. (No big version of this one.) Exposure: 60 minutes (20 x 3 min exposures; dark subtracted, no flats). Optics: Astro-Physics 5-inch F6 refractor @ F4.5. Camera: SBIG ST2000XM w/ST237 guiding chip (chip temp: -15C). Filter: Clear, IR-blocking. Mount: Losmandy G11. Guiding, camera control, image stacking, alignment & calibration: Maxim 4.10. 16-bit response curve tailored for web display in Photoshop CS2. Remote computer control: Access Remote PC. Another image captured remotely, this time with RoboFocus responding. I plugged RF into the other serial port and it worked fine. Then I had to mess with the configuration again to make it work after I carried the outfit outside. Who knows? Just practice. Ironically enough, being able to tweak the focus remotely didn't produce as good a result as I enjoyed last night from twisting the knobs and hoping for the best. Also, for some reason, tracking was a bit off tonight -- I should have rechecked polar alignment, I realize right now, hours too late, because wrestling the OTA on and off the mount likely moved it just a hair. The weather was even hotter and more humid than yesterday. I took everything out from an air-conditioned house much too late. Condensation plagued the first several photos even though I'm only cooling the chip to minus 15C. At midnight, the Peltier cooler still had to run at 90-94% to hold that temperature. I've used this telescope for 13 years, and I finally installed a finder today, an Orion 8x50, erect image version clipped to the same bracket as the RoboFocus (since I only need the finder when imaging). It let me put M3 on the chip very quickly. During the last few sessions, I've wasted a lot of dark just aiming the telescope. Sky brightness overhead at the end of tonight's session was 20.5 mags per square arc second -- the darkest I've measured here. For the record, at that level, trees are readily silhouetted against the sky and the Milky Way is very dimly visible if you know what to look for and where to look for it. <=Previous