A Big Night for Arps / A No-Show Star Party.

Tuesday night (10/6-7) was a nice night for piling up some Arp objects. Nothing really pretty here as I went for quantity over quality. Each object was given about a half hour of luminance using my C 9.25 operating at f/6.0. Here are the results:

These are presented cropped and scaled by 0.5X.

Tonight is the MAS's Fall Mini-Messier Marathon. It will probably be clouded out, but the alternate night (tomorrow) looks like it will be nice and clear. I plan on attending, not to do the marathon but to take a pretty picture of the Helix with the C 9.25 again at f/6.

I'm running at f/6.0 instead of the f/6.3 because after playing around with the focal reducer / sensor separation, I prefer how the images have come out at the slightly faster setting.

The No-Show Star Party of the title is the Eastern Iowa Star Party. I had planned on attending, but was unable to get any information from the hosting club other than the date and location. It's nice to know about things like amenities (AC Power, facilities, and fees are a few that come to mind.) before driving 5+ hours to attend. I strongly suggest to the QCAS (the Quad Cities astronomy club) that they post some information useful to potential attendees a few months before next year's EISP. So far as I was able to tell, they didn't post the party's date until less than a week before the event. If they want the party to maintain itself they need to get more information about it into public view in a more timely way.