Imaging Special Interest Group

The SJAA Imaging SIG held our third meeting on Sat. Oct 6. After 2 meetings at Houge Park in the Hall we met at the tennis courts at Houge Park to set up scopes and cameras to do some imaging. We had about 25 people come out for the meeting with about 14 bringing scopes and cameras. We did a complete walk through session from start to finish of setting up a mount to taking images. The areas we covered were polar alignment, setting up and balancing the scope & camera. We showed how to do a drift alignment of the mount, focusing with a Bahtinov mask, setting up and running an auto guider with PHD auto guiding software and finally we took some images of the Andromeda Galaxy.

The session was well received and attendees shared that they had learned a lot for the session and were motivated to try out some of the things they had learned from the session. We are planning the next SIG meeting with a few topics on using camera control and image acquisition software packages. The dates for the meetings will be announced very soon and posted on the SJAA main website.