Last night was a bit of an experiment. I had planned to do some Deep Sky imaging (galaxies, nebulae and star clusters) but because the clouds rolled in, I ended up only doing a few moon shots. I wanted to try using my QHY5P-IIC guide scope camera on my Skywatcher 200P telescope for getting some closer views of the moon. This camera also has a use as a planetary camera. I got all this stuff in a secondhand bundle with my mount last October and haven't used it until now. Little did I know how difficult it was going to be.
First of all I didn't bother with tracking as I couldn't see Polaris to do my polar alignment. Instead I just moved my equatorial (tracking) mount manually as a tripod. At such high magnifications it was so hard to even find the moon as I wasn't sure about where the focus was or even if I had the right number of extension tubes necessary to be able to focus this camera on my telescope.
I captured these images in SharpCap which also has to be used to focus the camera as, a bit like a webcam, it has no screen. Focusing caused the scope to wobble and so I had to turn the wheel a bit and then wait while it settled before making another small adjustment - very hit and miss.
But in the end I managed to get these two videos of the moon moving past my scope. Focusing probably could have been sharper and I didn't bother to alter any image quality or colour settings in SharpCap, which is something I'll look into next time.
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