All sky all night. Sun pillar at dawn. I banked on extreme cold limiting frost formation and skipped the lens warmer to save battery life. My bet paid off.
I had to setup the tracking mount well before Polaris was visible and my guess at alignment was close enough to keep the planets in the frame for about 80 minutes.
I caught the Starlink satellites at dawn. Clouds obscured them a little, but when the sky turns red look at the lower right of center around the 32 second mark.
Since I was already polar aligned for the tracking mount…
I started out at sunset using a new telescope to image Andromeda and only switched to time lapse after 8:30pm MST. Now that I have a telescope, there’s competition between wide-field time lapse and deep-sky stacking. While I have two cameras, I only have one portable battery bank and sturdy tripod.
I knew that frost was going to cover my lens when I put it out… but the focus adjustment on this lens is where the lens warmer goes, and I cannot manage to get it on without losing focus. So do I want blurry out of focus from start to finish, or blurry once the frost sets in? I went with latter, and trimmed most of the blurry out.
