On this, my first travel trip dedicated toward astrophotography, it was my hope to image one night dedicated to grabbing some fields for the ABC all sky survey using my Rokinon 135 on the AM5.  Then one night switching to my FLT91.  Really, I told myself, the real reason was to just see if I could do this efficiently and learn from the mistakes.  But truth be told, I really wanted to maximize the data I could collect.  Well, lessons were learned.  First of all, I made a good choice to move my rental days out by one day, to avoid the tail end of a two week rainy storm that moved throught the Pacific NW.  (Actually pretty amazing, since I blindly made the rental reservation at least three weeks prior!)  In fact, by weather standards, I could have done better if I actually delayed by one more day.  But that only pertained to terrestrial weather.  Had I done that, my primary days would have been during the solar storm and boy the aurora in Oregon were devistating to imaging here.  I know, because when I got home Friday afternoon, I set up for imaging that night.  The sky was so bright, I could see the light reflecting off the trees!    My ABC survey work ended up being limited to just three fields because of a few residual clouds that drifted by and fouled a good number of frames.  Being in Bortle 1 skies, the time to collect data for each field drops from at least 4 hrs for my home location (Bortle 4) to around 1 hr at Bortle 1.  

The image presented here is one of the fields.  While the ABC survey requires only a 1X drizzle, for this image I reprocessed at 2X drizzle to improve detail from my very undersampled image.  I know, given the paucity of any interesting features in this field, why go through the effort.  But I do think that is slightly sharpens the visible detail in M51 and M63 and even some of the smaller other galaxies, even when viewed at native size.  I think it stands up to even a bit more magnification.  The data suffered from tilt again.  But BXT makes short work of that.  Still, I thought I had the issue solved with this lens, so it is back to getting that fixed during these moon filled nights.  Once the sky clears again.  Given the integration time of 70 minutes, I am happy with the image depth.  ASTAP tells me my limiting magnitude is 19.1.  It shows me the objects that it uses to assess that.  But I can see objects even fainter.  Plate solving for PGC and other distant objects is finding several thousand distant galaxies, all see-able in the image.  In fact, I can see a few areas of IFN on more strongly stretched image of this data.  I can only see these areas of dust if I view the field image of the AKARI FIS WideL color data.  Data added for the lucky few who come to this page late: See Revisions C & D for the stretched field of my data and the AKARI FIS image showing the signal at 140 uM.  To reiterate, I think this will look much better with a significant increase in integration time at Bortle 1.  But I am not sure I want to dedicate that much time to such a rather unexciting addition to a not that exciting or appropriate field!  I have to say that I am pretty stunned that these features show up in a OSC image.  I tried just about every other camera/telescope image available on Aladin and the AKARI FIS wide L is the only one that verifies this structure.  Again, pretty amazing for just 1 hour of integration time.  I can only imagine what I would see if I put more hours through this f/2 setup!   So I am all in for Bortle 1.  Now I need to get over there more often.  And the nights have to start getting longer to make the trips worth it!

One thing to say about the Oregon Outback Dark Sky Sanctuary.  It is really nice to be just a 3 hour drive away from such skies.  And that would be great, except dark skies does not automatically mean clear skies.  This very large area (about to grow by considerable size with the addition of much more area), is within a real desert environment, with a fairly continuous mountain range to the west that is a rain shield.  But it is not the desert of the Southwest USA.  Its northern location stil puts it in the storm path for all that weather that smacks the PNW with the rain on the west slopes that it is famous for.  This means that this dark sky sanctuary is still prone to clouds making it over the mountains during fairly long chunks of the calendar year.  

Back to lessons learned.  My biggest mistake was that my whole imaging session the next night with my refractor was spoiled because I forgot to remove a planetary IR filter that I used 2 weeks previously for moon photography.  I needed to have my L-pro mounted instead.  So I thereby collected colorless images at the lower resolution that IR affords.  Bummer!

This was to be a shake-down cruise for the travel rigs.  Really, to see if I could survive with some comfort a few hours drive to the Bortle 1 skies of eastern Oregon and get all the new gear to work well enough to be productive.  This is my first time towing a small teardrop, basically a mobile bed, behind my new SUV.  See the image of this in the Revision.  This vehicle is not rated for towing the largest of payloads.  This small trailer is well below its capability.  The vehicle is a plug-in hybrid, which actually has more hp than the standard all gas or the hybrid versions.  I did not want to upgrade to a V6 or larger (even if available) since I rather not burn gas at a rate of 10-15 mpg.  I was pleased with the mpg at around an average of 26 mpg for the whole trip.  The trailer (a rental this time) is, however, too small for my old frame.  So this week, I will step up (again a rental) to a larger teardrop to evaluate the vehicle's ability to tow the few hundred extra pounds.  I think I will appreciate some more space in the interior and a galley for longer trips.

All the other gear worked well, bonehead mistakes aside.  I have proven my solar generator at home over the last few months.  Though the solar panel (200W at max) is new.  I great deal, phenomenal actually comparing to other 200 watt travel panels I have seen for twice the price.  I consumed about 40% of the generator's charge overnight, including the astro-rig, my laptop charging (old battery does badly in cold temps), phone charging, and the inverter for powering my cpap!  The solar panel was set up at 8 AM and had the battery at full charge in a couple hours or so.  I'll need to work on getting a better food lineup, etc. for future consideration.