The last few nights have been nice and clear for a change so I’ve been outside with my telescope. Friday night was bitterly cold so I didn’t spend long, but tonight was much warmer. Jupiter is perfectly placed for observing from my back garden so it’s been an obvious target.

The tracking on Friday night was not very good – making for a lot more work then it should have when trying to capture images using the LPI. I also found that I couldn’t get as fine control as I wanted over the exposure using the program I had been playing with, so I swapped back to Meade’s own. I’d played with this initially but had been unable to get any good images so had stopped using it. I did manage to get an image that wasn’t too horrible, but not as good as I hoped for.

Between Friday and today I retrained the scopes tracking – what an improvement! Suddenly the tracking is good enough that very little adjustment is needed during a lengthy capture sequence. I also did some web research on using the Meade software and thanks to a couple of sites finally managed to get it to work as well as I always thought it should. The resultant image is much better!

I’m sure that I’m still not getting as much out of the software as I can and so more usage should bring better results. The biggest issue I have is trying to get the LPI in focus. I have the parfocal lens but may need to adjust it slightly. The focus isn’t too bad, but I just keep thinking it can be improved upon!

Let’s hope for more clear skies!