Last month I bought an iOptron equatorial mount in preparation for the upcoming solar eclipse. Using it for astro work is a side benefit that I was definitely looking forward to. Combatting the drought was a side benefit that I should have expected. The sky in Riverside is impressively bad, in addition to the light pollution there is the near constant haze, dust etc. With rain on Saturday night, few clouds, and a favorable moon, things looked promising for getting some practice with the new toy. I guess I can say that my excursion was a success, in that one of my primary goals was to find the problems. While I was at it, I figured it would be a good time to try out the type 3 astrotracer on my K-3 III. According to the "dark sky" map I looked at, there's a place about halfway between Riverside and Palm Springs that looked promising. I loaded up camera gear, and warm clothes and headed out. My first challenge was to find a place off the freeway where I could park and set up my gear. That took a bit of work, I did find something not far from an Arrowhead water plant and the train tracks. I got there and was having trouble finding "North", the compass mode on my phones sky map app wasn't working well, and I decided to set up the K-3 III on my small tripod. The first thing that I learned is that the ball head on the Heipi travel tripod is not sufficient for a camera with the bigma on it. Fortunately I had brought my old big ball head. The next thing I learned was that a green laser is very helpful for aiming, it would be even more helpful if I had a way of mounting it to an arca swiss plate, or hot shoe. There was definitely a learning curve getting the type 3 astrotracer working. I was reminded last night about just how horrible Ricoh documentation is. It also requires a pretty solid bright object to target. Did I mention that the sky sucked? I also found myself missing the adjustable screen on the K-1. I also wish that there was some way of telling whether it is still running an astrotracer shot, or if it has finished. As to the equatorial mount, I was never even able to get it aimed. My list of difficulties is too long to enumerate, but I've bought a simple compass rather than relying on google sky map. Also, did I mention that the sky sucked On future attempts it looks like I'll need to drive the hour and a half out to Joshua Tree. My sidequest of learning K-3 III astrotracer was successful to the point of getting some frames in which the Orion Nebula is recognizable. Better than a previous attempt some years ago on a partly cloudy night half way between San Jose and Santa Cruz. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/albums/72177720313901027 I've gotten to that stage of my life where my goal for an evening isn't so much to get great photos, but to try and learn about all of the problems before I go and try to get some good shots. -- Larry Colen lrc@red4est.com sent from ret13est