Ten Mile River Scout Camp Astronomy

This year our troop went to Ten Mile River (Camp Aquehonga) twice. It’s a long tale and I’ll spare you. I normally help out and co-teach the Astronomy merit badge class but during our second week (actual week 4 of the camp), attendance was very light and no one had signed up for the classes. I spent a little time actually getting in a night of imaging, but had a number of issues.

One of my dew heaters was not working; still haven’t got back to test it so I’m not sure if it is the heater strap or the control channel. But the effect was that my guide scope dewed over so I was unable to guide for the iOptron CEM25EC, but I figured it should track well. Or it would have had I been a bit better polar aligned, but it did well enough. Then I decide to take a nap while it was imaging since I still had to be up in the morning with the scouts. When my alarm went off a couple of hours later, instead of having 2 hours of images, I discovered my laptop had decided to also go to sleep after a mere half hour. And at that point, there was massive fog, so there was no point in starting it up again.

So instead of 2-3 hours of imaging data, I got 30 minutes. I tried some quick processing while at camp hoping to get it into the camp slide show as an inspiration for scouts to take astronomy in the future, but didn’t really have the time. That may be just as well, since just this week, one of of the authors I follow on YouTube posted a video with a quick processing workflow aimed at narrowband imaging that worked quite well for this uncalibrated image.

For those interested in seeing all the labeled object, have a look at the image on astrobin.com where I’ve started posting my images. You can also browse to find similar images, and a huge variety of tips and help if you’re looking to get started in this hobby yourself.