Night 2 - Exhausted and Crabby

The day began with a great hike up to Mt. Lemmon Peak which I decided to participate in to give my leg and ankle a little workout. The hike was amazing regardless of the fact that I turned back about halfway up due to soreness. I took a couple of pictures at the point where I turned around, you be the judge:

KAF

After an afternoon of preparations, we changed our web cam attachment to the 105mm lens and began imaging Jupiter for the second night. We started by finding our focus value by taking 5 second videos from 17900 to 17800 dropping ten units each time. After stacking these images it was determines the optimal focus value was between 17840 and 17870. We then took about 10 videos ranging from 1800 frames to 2500 frames. This took us about 2 hours. Once we had all of our videos it was time to begin stacking frames in an attempt to get one sharp picture, this tested my patience. I read through manuals, looked at online tutorials, and played with Registax for a couple of hours and came up with a pretty good image. I then proceeded to save an empty file somehow and lost the image. #@$%!!!! In lieu of this loss I doubled my research efforts and started over with the 17855 focus video. A good focus combined with lots of trial and error yielded my personal best image yet, here it is:

With my interest in Jupiter exhausted, I took 3 exposures of the Ghost of Jupiter Planetary Nebula for personal studies. I am excited to develop these and see how it turns out. About five of us got to pick personal stellar objects to image tonight, once all of those were done we began preliminary imaging on Saturn. As I was working on Jupiter Image compiling I did not get to see much of Saturn but I am excited to see the others results.

On an interesting side note: while Coty, Ian, and I were cooking dinner we were surprised by a little friend hiding in our spaghetti pot!

(Its a scorpion, I am breaking the story to the rest of our classmates on this blog... They will have no idea until they read this!)




p.s. tempers are getting short due to lack of sleep, hopefully nobody does any lasting damage by speaking before they think.