Not really important, but I am pretty damn proud of my scientific achievement here. This is copied from my amateur astronomer thread, but I wanted to show it to the only audience that really cared about this stuff on CP. This was taken Friday Aug 6th at about 2 am:
Okay people. I finally took my first astrophotos. Not the best quality, but I am pretty satisfied for a first attempt. This is a picture I took of Jupiter using the Neximage CCD camera. Basically a modified Phiilips webcam optimized for astrophotography. It was a tedious process to get Jupiter in the field of view, as the CCD camera it narrows it quite a bit, I would estimate about 80%. So it was a lot of trial, error and scope realignment to get it to track long enough to keep it on my laptop screen without wandering away. I can definitely see the merits of a German Equatorial mount, and I will be adding one very soon. Anyway, this is a stack of 30 seconds of frames, at 5 FPS. I am pretty sure you can see the GRS just on the lower right. Focusing was a bitch, as I had to do it manually by turning the knob, so a motor focuser is in the cards as well, as it allows for ultra fine adjustments.
I will add the actual movie file I used fonce I load it to youtube.