After a busy Christmas and New Year holiday period and restart of work along with the formal announcement of the 'End of Research' at Perth Observatory where I volunteer for public outreach, I struggled to find time to get back to my OAG experimentation started in late 2012 and to start working through objects of interest in my third year of DSLR AP.

I had also bought a GSO 2" 1.1x Coma Corrector and did a test of this on 28/1/2013 to find its best back focus distance was ~70mm, but that it does not perform as well as the Baader MPCC that I have been using since May 2012. It's one advantage is the extra 15mm back focus allows for the addition of a low profile OAG or filter changer into the optical train.

Having been using BackyardEOS (BYE) for most of 2012, initially with a Canon 400D which does not have Live View mode, my addition of a Canon 40D in the second half of 2012 enabled the Planetary mode of BYE but I had not experimented with it. I did some initial trials with this in late February 2013 and with Registax 6 to post process the AVI video files created. A longer focal length than I can achieve with a 2X Televue PowerMate is needed for the major planets with my 480mm and borrowed 800mm telescopes, so I put a 4X PowerMate on my wish list and added one to my collection in late April and first tested 26th April on Saturn and the Moon. Focus at the longer focal length and keeping it in focus is quite a challenge!

Another aim for the year is to try some piggy-back wide-field with my standard 18-5mm DSLR lens as I've pretty much neglected this apart from a few star trails and movement sequences to date.

My object plans for the year are to pick up a few missed Messier and Caldwell objects and revist a few interesting ones from initial captures, as well as the interesting, but mostly faint dark-sky, Gum catalogue objects http://galaxymap.org/cgi-bin/gum.py?s=1 as they are Southern Hemisphere objects.

I returned to TS-OAG9 Off Axis Guider testing in late March after arranging a thin spacer to ensure that the guide camera could be at 180 degree position with my DSLR for best off-axis pick-off area. Tested with Hotech SCA Field Flattener on my 80mm f/6 Refractor on 31/3/2013 and with a Baader Multi Purpose Coma Corrector (MPCC) with a 200mm f/4 Newtonian on 1/4/2013 with success despite not being at optimal back focus for either of these optical correctors. Further testing is needed to determine how versatile this configuration is in finding guide stars so that I can relegate the separate guidescope to a backup only.