Hodgson Observatory

For the last two weeks I’ve been teaching an astronomy course at Wheaton College’s Science Station in the Black Hills. Last Wednesday evening, July 9, I took my class to visit the Hidden Valley Observatory in Rapid City, which is run by the Black Hills Astronomical Society (http://rap.midco.net/ggladfel/BHAS/). The observatory director, Steve Parker, was kind enough to host our group of eight students plus myself. They showed us their homemade 12.5-inch Newtonian reflector on a German Equatorial Mount housed in their dome, two homemade Dobsonians, a swivel-chair binocular mount, and a Meade My Sky. The observatory resides at St. Martin’s Monastery, on land that is leased by the Society for a nominal fee. Since the Moon was out it was hard to tell how dark the skies really were; lights from Rapid City were evident. The highlight of the evening was a 10:57 PM Iridium flare that reached magnitude -3. I took a photo of the flare with the observatory in the background. The moon is hidden by the tree to the left of center. I didn’t want the moon to overexpose in the 22-second image. Hope you like it!

Fernando and I had discussed some practice as I am very new to Astro Imaging and he has a very similar system he would like to get set up. We decided to set up in his back yard as it is fairly protected from light. We set up at about 8:30 pm on 6/29/08 to get the hardware set up work done in day light. We then waited for some guide stars to appear. At about 9:45 we were able to do an alignment and proceed with the adjustments to put the system into a camera only mode. We imaged M57 the Ring Nebula and M27 the Dumbbell nebula. All images were taken through a 120 mm F 8.3 Orion refractor at double focal length using a Televue 2X powermate. The system was guided with an Orion Star Shoot Guide Camera. Pictures were taken with a Canon EOS XSi DSLR at ISO 1600 and 5 images each of 10 minutes. All I can say is WOW!

This is from a previous imaging session when I was testing out the new SSAG (Star Shoot Auto Guider). I was not trying for the best shot here only to test the system. This is 10 images of 5 minutes each of M13 at ISO 1600.