Saturday, October 01, 2005

LPI First Light

I purchased a Meade Lunar-Planetary Imager (LPI) Thursday, and got a chance to try it out last night at the Dam in the LX200. Thank you Richard for the loan of the Televue 2x Barlow.



It wasn't the best of nights. The seeing was below average, and we had a pretty good breeze swirling around. Add to that my impatience--Mars was only 35° off the horizon--and you've got a pretty poor image. Still, it's better than my first attempt.

Meade ships the LPI with some Windows software that I tried out with craptacular results, so I used the OEM Mac driver from Sonix and processed with Lynkeos.

Took me seven attempts to find a good combination of exposure & gain. The final image is the best 150 or so out of 360 frames.

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