DeepskyWim

I was on La Palma from January 15 to January 21 for a technical mission at the Mercator telescope.  The weather was not very good, but I managed to get out the Orion Skyquest XT12i IntelliScope  we have in the Mercator building on the first evening I was there.   I forgot already that the sky is so unbelievably good from the Roque de los Muchachos.  There was quite some wind, but I could hide behind the car, so the wind did not disturb me that much.  The telescope has a right angle finder and a telrad, but the batteries of the telrad were empty, so I could not use the telrad.  Pointing the telescope with only a right angle finder is very difficult, so it was not easy to find the objects I was looking for.  It was quite cold, with a temperature of 2.3° when I started observing around 19h40 and a temperature of 3.7° when I stopped around 22h15.  The humidity fell from 57.5% to 33.2% and the wind speed was around 6 m/s.  I did not observe for a very long time, because I had to wake up ve

On October 25, we could enjoy a small solar eclipse from Belgium.  At the maximum, 19.5% of the Sun was obscured.  The weather was not perfect, but most of the clouds only appeared after the maximum.   The eclipse around maximum As the Sun was not high enough in the sky yet to be seen from our backyard, we set up everything in front of our house.  We invited some of the neighbours to have a look through our eclipse glasses.   In full action I used  Solar Eclipse Maestro  to automate taking the pictures to make a timelapse.  Sadly, Solar Eclipse Maestro does not work anymore with newer versions of macOS, so I had to install an old version of macOS in a virtual machine.  I used my  Canon EOS 80D  with the  Canon EF70-300mm f/4-5.6L IS USM .  I fear that I did not focus good enough, so that is something I have to take into account during the next solar eclipse!  Anyway, the pictures are still good enough to make a timelapse.   I also tried the  Skywatcher AZ-GTi  mount for the first time