Jim Kern and I spent about four hours at the RIT Observatory in the early evening of Dec 9, 1998. Our main goal was to confirm a SN candidate in NGC 925.
We first attempted to use the Meade 10" telescope with CCD. When we turned on the Meade telescope and asked it to point to a bright star, it moved about 20 degrees away from the target. But, after we moved the telescope manually to the target and zeroed the coordinates, the telescope subsequently pointed well: targets fell at the edge of the main eyepiece's field of view -- maybe 1/4 degree away from the center.
We placed the Meade Pictor CCD camera on the 10", with the focal reducer in place. The field of view was about 15x10 arcmin. We pointed at NGC 925, but couldn't see any object in the eyepiece. CCD images likewise showed nothing. I moved the telescope around a bit and took more pictures, but still failed to see any hint of galaxy. The galaxy was in the bright eastern sky ...
Next, we moved to the 16" telescope. We arranged the equipment like so:
We eventually discovered that by pointing the telescope to a nearby star and centering on the CCD, then making a short offset (about 4 degrees) to the target, we could get it to fall into the small field of view: about 6x4 arcmin.
We were barely able to see the nucleus of the galaxy in the CCD images on the laptop during the night. We made a mosaic around the galaxy, about 4-by-3 or so, covering the entire extent of a finding chart from the Digitized Sky Survey. We saw no evidence for any bright (10th mag) new stellar source.
I later discovered that several other observers also reported negative findings for this candidate. Oh, well.
We also tried placing the Pulnix intensified video camera in the Orion Short-tube refractor mounted on the 16" telescope. We used a focus slide tube from Jim's Newtonian reflector to move the camera far enough away from the refractor body to focus properly. A hose clamp around the slide tube kept the camera from sliding out and falling off.
The field of view is about 1 degree. We had a very nice view of the Pleiades. The Orion nebula showed up as a small fuzzy patch, all the stars in the Triangulum blurred together. The view looks best when the camera is set to its lowest gain and low gamma value. The faintest stars we could see might have been mag 7 or 8.
We also tried to find asteroid Ceres, but the star fields were so sparse that we couldn't be sure of its identity. We need to make good charts that match the magnitude limit and have field of view marked properly.
It looks like the setup will be nice for public nights!