It's been cloudy and rainy here in the Pacific Northwest for, and I'm not exaggerating here, the last 10,000 years. We finally caught a very slight break in the weather a couple of weeks back... just enough time for me to try to finish collimating a new HyperStar lens. Just when I got everything set up and focused, though, I saw Orion peeking out from in-between the trees.
I'm a rank beginner in all this, and I've been waiting for a chance, *any* chance, to have *any* time with photographing Orion this winter. So, I did what any irrational person would do: bagged the collimation session and tried to photograph Orion through the stinging gauntlet of Hell that is my backyard combined with the wettest Pacific Northwest winter in a decade.
The photo (posted on Astrobin
here) actually turned out... well, I won't say good for anyone else, but good for my efforts so far. Let's face it, it's a sliding scale.
In any event, I made this video of the raw light frames using PixInsight's blink function to recreate the horror of watching the subs come in during the imaging session and being like, welp, what the heck...
Full description of the debacle is
here. Something I ask my kids when they're frustrated at a task or skill that is hard and that they still aren't very good at yet is: "Well. Are you still having fun?" The answer here is: "Yes. Yes I am."
But if anyone out there can turn off the atmospheric river coming off the Pacific Ocean this year, I'd appreciate it. Great for snowboarding, not so good for looking at the stars.
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