Messier Marathon 2013 With ACP Scheduler

[Chris Johnson]

I've always wanted to try to image the entire marathon in one night. This year, I went with my observatory partner Greg out to the Saguaro Astro event at the Antennas about 85 west miles of Phoenix. I setup Friday night and spent the evening running many T-point runs to dial the alignment on my Paramount MX down to under 20 arc seconds. The goal was to shoot 180 second unguided subs on my TOA-150 / ST-4000XCM. The seeing was 1/5. The NOAA site showed such a distorted pattern of the jet stream over Arizona, I knew I was going to have problems. It was so bad that images were distorted so badly that I was initially blaming hardware. After consulting other imagers at the event, they were experiencing the same issues. I have never seen seeing this bad before. Regardless, I pushed on, after stopping my run and losing a few targets in trying to determine if it was an issue with my setup. I bagged 105 of them. I went to bed at about 1AM, and woke up at 6:30am to cap the scope.

ACP Scheduler ran PERFECTLY. If I hadn't aborted it a few times for the first hour or so trying to determine why the stars were all messed up, I'm 100% confident I would have gotten all 110 targets.


Full Size Contact Sheet Here

[Bob Denny]

Check out the latest ACP Scheduler web page. Your marathon adventure is featured!!