tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4514093260129867742024-03-13T00:28:35.793-07:00The AstronoMolly LogAstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.comBlogger315125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-21629576227661661582024-03-03T19:55:00.000-08:002024-03-03T20:04:03.997-08:00Automated Solar Eclipse Sequence in NINA<p>Everybody always says to not image a solar eclipse but just witness it instead -- but why have just one when you can have both!</p><p>In the past, I've successfully automated my eclipse imaging using BackyardNikon with my DSLR, and it worked great. I started the main eclipse sequence exactly 1 minute before 2nd contact, and I had carefully timed everything and practiced a bunch, and I got some great images in 2017 and 2019 without having to look at my camera or computer once during totality.</p><p>But now for 2024, I'm ready to use an astro cam instead, which opens up some great possibilities with automation. NINA is my tool of choice since there is so much flexibility in the exact ordering and timing of events.</p><p>I've been talking about making this sequence for a while, but with PhD things, I'm finally just now having some time -- and I finally got it done and tested! A lot of people have asked if they can have a copy of the sequence, and I'm happy to share.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Files:</h3><div><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-JXnb-55VZJopL19WqTz2NDx2ls_C7TY/view?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">Whole eclipse, with clock times</a></div><div><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1petqz0gGmplPJRC-IScx9ULdSfzIyuCl/view?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">Whole eclipse, with time spans</a> instead of clock times for testing</div><div><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/18znxcP8h50Ayvr6sqr9QLIeiBq5bWaf3/view?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">Whole eclipse, with no LuckyImaging</a> plugin box</div><div><a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BQFBDEGTMnwWd9hTaXfMT318ihHzBqjo/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=112352032754518817175&rtpof=true&sd=true" target="_blank">Excel spreadsheet</a> for planning times</div><div><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/11j3Ysme4FDSxe9gWNVdojG7TtDpmkYkb/view?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">README file</a> with the same information in this post</div><div><a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VnwDKh32cSvx3DCU4q7LINj3CyDQj0Dz?usp=drive_link" target="_blank">Link to the folder</a> with all of these</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXoKyAkbX7CEY4hV-2HJpqPxmU8ewMrcVIpJdoznnulFddmOrdAJalksS-vEVkvdP-jyaYXzV7brdr5hxSX_4yyESIjU7epWhGvWg5MZDieWPnJlhMWfVAS3A9SfWA4in_Q6tI9ew6FKZL7pxmz9iZZIeP3jkRYQo05jpGsXAVUEqNnHDTegcnUK6YAbk/s2040/nina.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1295" data-original-width="2040" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXoKyAkbX7CEY4hV-2HJpqPxmU8ewMrcVIpJdoznnulFddmOrdAJalksS-vEVkvdP-jyaYXzV7brdr5hxSX_4yyESIjU7epWhGvWg5MZDieWPnJlhMWfVAS3A9SfWA4in_Q6tI9ew6FKZL7pxmz9iZZIeP3jkRYQo05jpGsXAVUEqNnHDTegcnUK6YAbk/w640-h406/nina.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">IMPORTANT NOTES</h2><div>You <i>will </i>need to modify this sequence! It is set specifically for timing at the location I will be at, and the exposure times are set for a specific calibration point in Fred Espenak's table (more on that in a second). I'm also including the spreadsheet I used to work out all the timing of each imaging phase. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Exposure Times</h3><div>First, you need to calibrate your astro cam to <a href="https://www.mreclipse.com/SEphoto/SEphoto.html" target="_blank">Fred Espenak's exposure table</a>. Scroll down on this page to the "Solar Eclipse Exposure Guide." It's designed for DSLRs, so you'll need to choose a gain on your camera to match an ISO/f-stop value so you know which column to use. </div><div><br /></div><div>To do this, set up the telescope and camera in the configuration you're going to use for the eclipse. Put on the same solar filter you're going to use, and find out whether it is ND 4 or ND 5 (how dark it is). My Seymour Solar filter is ND 5. Get the sun in your camera's field of view. Then, in the live-view app of your choice (SharpCap is perfect for this), choose an exposure time from the table in the ND 4 or ND 5 row, depending on which filter you have, and set that as the exposure time on your camera. For instance, I used the column where the partial phase with an ND 5 filter has an exposure time of 1/250s, or 4 ms. Then I adjusted the gain until the sun looked good. I used the Histogram tool and looked for when the combined histogram peak (white) had a hump around 50% (you'll also have a peak at darker values -- this is the black background). You don't want too high of a gain so you don't sacrifice dynamic range, nor too low that you end up in the last column and the outer corona images end up being very long. On my ZWO ASI2600MC Pro, I chose 210. So these settings put me in the column with the partial phase ND 5 exposure time of 1/250s, and I can base the exposure times for all the rest of the phenomena from there. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkvjHsFX-7w-gXVxMcb0NkXP6ojLSyQO8FX2RNg8B4CpAWYEPn2IwxnYBcChZLo6bVxIcJhTFIl5ZY7s8CyVzvKG1kVLshoxV7EImB8Gpp4X-tM8jDyzcnhN8g835aYwKE4yfdr8mZ8NAii-DBrv26atMOBaCh60CFjMyp8gBJdvmncsRfTTIF6SwKKLU/s2048/settings.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1291" data-original-width="2048" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkvjHsFX-7w-gXVxMcb0NkXP6ojLSyQO8FX2RNg8B4CpAWYEPn2IwxnYBcChZLo6bVxIcJhTFIl5ZY7s8CyVzvKG1kVLshoxV7EImB8Gpp4X-tM8jDyzcnhN8g835aYwKE4yfdr8mZ8NAii-DBrv26atMOBaCh60CFjMyp8gBJdvmncsRfTTIF6SwKKLU/w400-h253/settings.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>For the eclipse, I'm using the whole FOV, not the ROI I'm showing here.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Eclipse Timing</h3><div>To get all the contact times, I used <a href="http://xjubier.free.fr/en/site_pages/SolarEclipseCalc_Diagram.html" target="_blank">Xavier Jubier's website</a>, where you can put in the coordinates of where you plan on imaging from, and it will tell you the "local circumstances," including each of the precise contact times, the altitude & azimuth of where the sun will be at that time, and some other numbers. If you have a backup location, I would make a separate sequence for that location if it is different enough in its timing. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Organization</h3><div>There are three Sequential Instruction Sets -- pre-eclipse partial phase, totality, and post-eclipse partial phase. The totality instruction set has several sub-sets for the different eclipse features -- the sliver while you remove your filter before 2nd contact, Bailey's Beads right around 2nd contact, chromosphere shortly after 2nd contact, the corona out to multiple solar radii (shorter exposures for the bright inner corona, and longer exposures for the dimmer outer corona), prominences when the moon is centered at mid-eclipse and a "long" exposure for outermost corona and hopefully Earthshine, then another round of corona shots because there's time (if you're uncertain about your gain setting, you could do a different set of gain/exposure times for this second runthrough), and then finally chromosphere just before 3rd contact, Bailey's Beads & diamond ring through 3rd contact, and then some short exposures while you put your filter back on. Then the post-eclipse partial phase picks back up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Each segment loops until the start time of the next feature; no need to time how fast your capture rate is and estimate a number of exposures to fit the right time frame. The segment will stop when it hits the "loop until" time and move onto the next segment automatically. Most of the segments are 15s long. During the partial phases, the sets of bracketed exposures are 5 minutes apart; feel free to change this.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Other Notes</h3><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Bracketing</h4><div>Each phenomenon segment has three exposure times -- the one from Fred's table, and then half that, and then double that. It's a long eclipse, so there's plenty of time for this.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Computing Power</h4><div>While NINA isn't especially resource-heavy, you'll definitely want to test the capture speed if you're using an older machine or a light tablet. It's a lot of image download very rapidly, and it might get bogged down.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you have a computer with a solid-state hard drive, highly recommend using that to maximize frame rate. If you're using an astro cam with USB 3.0, definitely use a computer with a 3.0 port. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am using my Microsoft Surface Pro 7 -- less power-hungry than a laptop, but pretty capable, and it as a USB 3.0 A port.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Bailey's Beads</h4><div>On my camera and computer, it takes about 2-3 seconds per frame to capture and download, with star analysis and stretching turned off. Make sure you turn these off! (Toggle the buttons for these at the top of the Image tab in the Imaging view). This isn't ideal for very quick events like Bailey's Beads, so I decided to try something, but only on the 3rd contact Bailey's Beads, just in case -- using video mode. There's a plugin for NINA called LuckyImaging, which adds a container type called Lucky Target Container, and within that, I use the Take Video Roi Exposures. I turned off using an ROI -- I could probably get a faster frame rate using one, but just in case the sun ends up not quite centered, I don't want to miss it. You can try using an ROI if you have good enough tracking. This lets me take 3 fps at a single exposure time. It still saves out FITS files. In the # box, I've got 100 frames set (it will stop when it hits the "loop until" time), and for the exposure time, the Bailey's Beads exposure time from Fred's table. I should also get the Diamond Ring here. The other reason I'm not doing this for the 2nd contact Bailey's Beads is so that I can bracket, just in case these exposure times end up a little off.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Safety Notes</h4><div>As always, never point your scope at the sun without a solar filter firmly in place. Don't take it off until at most a minute before totality; you're safe within 30 seconds of totality for sure with a refractor, maybe shorter if you're using a large-aperture reflector. Also make sure you cover any guide scopes or spotting scopes, or remove them. Never put solar eclipse glasses on the eyepiece side of a telescope or pair of binoculars, you can burn out your eyes and your optics!</div><div><br /></div><div>Make sure your computer is in the shade! In 2017, my tablet shut off about 40 minutes before totality because it overheated; fortunately I was able to get it cooled and back on before totality. I put it in the shade of my telescope case.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">My Equipment</h4><div>Wondering what I'm planning on using? </div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Telescope: Astro-Tech 72ED</li><ul><li> It has a focal length of 430mm, so a good wide FOV for corona. A bit longer would probably be better, but this scope is a lot lighter and smaller than my Takahashi FSQ-106N.</li></ul><li>Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro</li><ul><li>Color camera, APS-C format sensor. You could certainly use an uncooled camera, or one with a smaller sensor if your focal length is short enough. I don't recommend doing mono; it would be a lot of filter changes and focus shifts and basically a lot of dead time to get each color. Note: you don't need an H-alpha filter to see the prominences and chromosphere -- they become visible during totality!</li></ul><li>Mount: Celestron NexStar SE</li><ul><li>I chose this mount because it is alt-az instead of equatorial, which means I don't need to polar-align the night before (or with a compass/tilt meter during the day, which is approximate at best). I can just plop it down, put in my coordinates and the time, say "here's the sun," and it will track it pretty well. I may have to nudge it once or twice, but it will definitely keep the sun centered for the duration of totality. As far as tracking stability goes, when I used to use this mount for deep sky back in the early dates, I could take images as long as 20 or 30 seconds before too many of them started to streak.</li></ul><li>Computer: Microsoft Surface Pro 7, a tablet of pretty good computing power but in a compact and not-power-hungry package.</li></ul></div><div><span><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwV4dNWsnyqQUFI2R9dH0BPht0ub610kiATUgF-MgP_-dryxFMIfs01Gyq_R-82yAVg1TVfcG8e_j5Mokax6Ju3SsZfejPrJ2OsJ7mduVl4wVaKhulq9oflS7BwpcmZTNCyQJWE2xT524cNI3WFmILtBDSVxxVvd7F2C_UG8B0qULwcpBt0bPDQz8t8lg/s1270/Screenshot%202024-03-03%20203158.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1270" data-original-width="955" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwV4dNWsnyqQUFI2R9dH0BPht0ub610kiATUgF-MgP_-dryxFMIfs01Gyq_R-82yAVg1TVfcG8e_j5Mokax6Ju3SsZfejPrJ2OsJ7mduVl4wVaKhulq9oflS7BwpcmZTNCyQJWE2xT524cNI3WFmILtBDSVxxVvd7F2C_UG8B0qULwcpBt0bPDQz8t8lg/w301-h400/Screenshot%202024-03-03%20203158.png" width="301" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>At this position, I might not be able to reach the 68 degrees the sun will be at for me -- I'm going to add a longer dovetail so I can sit it further forward.</i></div><br /></span></span></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Troubleshooting</h4><div>I was having trouble with my 2600 having an error and disconnecting for exposure times longer than 1s; I figured out that even though it can run off USB power alone for shorter exposures, it needs the 12V power, even though I'm not cooling, for longer exposures. Plugging it in solved the problem. I'm not cooling so that I can run on battery power if I have to (using my Jackery); if I have AC power, I'll probably run the cooler at -5C or -10C, if it's not too hot, to reduce noise for the longer exposures. The max exposure time I'm using is 15s, so not much noise will accumulate, but still. </div><div><br /></div><div>The sequence is quite large -- it might take several seconds to open.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you notice any errors or have questions, you can reach out to me either on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/astronomolly" target="_blank">Facbeook</a> or via email at astronomolly.images at gmail dot com. You can also post a comment below.</div><div><br /></div><div>Want to see my previous eclipse notes?</div><div>- <a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2017/08/107-monday-august-21-2017-total-eclipse.html" target="_blank">2017, Casper, WY</a></div><div>- <a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2019/07/193-tuesday-july-2-2019-solar-eclipse.html" target="_blank">2019, La Higuera, Chile</a></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-91406561313404645532021-11-19T18:38:00.003-08:002021-11-19T18:39:50.248-08:00#590 - A Frosty Lunar Eclipse<p> The year 2021, despite its many setbacks, was a good year for lunar eclipses -- we were treated to two here in the US! I was fortunate to be able to image both from my house.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">A rushed setup</h2><div>I had just returned to Ohio from a trip out to Berkeley, CA to conduct my PhD research experiment out at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 88-inch Cyclotron, having come back early because the cyclotron broke down and we were unable to run the experiment. A sad thing turned into a good thing though -- I had planned on imaging the eclipse from the roof of the cyclotron during my graveyard shift, but California ended up being clouded over! Ohio, on the other hand, was only partly cloudy (although the forecast had called for very few clouds). </div><div><br /></div><div>I got back to my house from the airport at about 10:15 PM, and after dropping off my suitcases inside and saying hello to my cats, I got busy getting my imaging rig set up. I had brought my Vixen Polarie and carbon-fiber Neewer tripod with me to California, but since I was home, I set up my more-stable Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer on my Celestron AVX tripod instead. (Same center bolt size!) Atop the Star Adventurer was my trusty Nikon D5300, paired with my Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G lens. The lens is a bit soft and has some chromatic aberration, but it's the longest one I have. I had wanted to image the eclipse using my Takahashi telescope and ZWO ASI294MC Pro color camera, but unfortunately the Moon would drop below the edge of my roof before totality started. So I set up the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer in my driveway.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZUgB8PL1GR4uxuSH1fCJswGPJiqQTw0uG0c7x7eYxz1rf0iAQXGgofvbzA485DKtFQFZ2EnL40MAEkGtL0fp64QJ2tjIplC4AN-IT35i8WU6Y7HZk8YehJGwtRvstSqDwFdu9gD0hQJg/s4000/20211119_082942.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="2252" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZUgB8PL1GR4uxuSH1fCJswGPJiqQTw0uG0c7x7eYxz1rf0iAQXGgofvbzA485DKtFQFZ2EnL40MAEkGtL0fp64QJ2tjIplC4AN-IT35i8WU6Y7HZk8YehJGwtRvstSqDwFdu9gD0hQJg/w360-h640/20211119_082942.jpg" width="360" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Taken the morning after</i></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>To operate the DSLR, I set up my old Microsoft Surface 3 on a folding table and connected the camera via USB to BackyardNikon, an indispensable app for DSLR astrophotography. It was below freezing outside, so I worked quickly to get everything plugged in, and I built the rig inside the house and then brought it outside. After getting the camera pointed at the Moon and setting the Star Adventurer to the lunar tracking rate, I dashed back inside to operate the tablet from my toasty warm desktop computer using Google Chrome Remote Desktop. For the May 2021 lunar eclipse, I timed my exposures with the different phases of the eclipse, but I was running out of time to do all the math, so I decided to just brute-force it instead, especially since this was a very long-duration eclipse; I just made a list of several exposure times running from 1/4000s (for the pre-eclipse phase) to 30s (which I probably wouldn't need since this eclipse wasn't total, but just in case). Then I ran it in Loop mode all night. From Dayton, the eclipse ran from 1 AM until after sunrise, with maximum eclipse occurring at about 4 AM.</div><div><br /></div><div>I finally got to bed at around 1 AM (I had also set up my Takahashi to run a similar loop to get what I could before the Moon set behind the roof). I woke up by accident at 4 AM, but took the opportunity to dash outside and re-point the camera to be good for the rest of the night. Polar alignment on my Star Adventurer is never that great; I think I've offset the polar scope alignment image by accident. But it hadn't drifted out of the frame at least, so that was good. It also gave me a chance to take a look at the eclipsed Moon, which was obviously not in 100% totality like the two other lunar eclipses I've seen, but still pretty cool! Even if it was behind some thin clouds.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Results</h2><div>Despite the clouds, I got quite a few clear shots! I downloaded about 15 GB of data in the morning from the tablet and sorted through the images, deleting the over-exposed ones and the clouded-out ones. In the end, I made a few composites I'm quite happy with, as well as a few single exposures that came out really cool.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBdaqhCnwe_pxkOp-m_Y0DGopav39scx_VMZLvmsbaZ2ILd3QRIryZ-yqBelqsWmv77I1L5AHTBIB1jhI8-OzRihkjJ1-SLdLPCbHVdmfCbKef6uxHIALrf_-eYSyWCWiOyrHbcTXt_44/s4848/moon_LIGHT_Tv12s_200iso_5-6_20211119-01h53m06s704ms+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3232" data-original-width="4848" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBdaqhCnwe_pxkOp-m_Y0DGopav39scx_VMZLvmsbaZ2ILd3QRIryZ-yqBelqsWmv77I1L5AHTBIB1jhI8-OzRihkjJ1-SLdLPCbHVdmfCbKef6uxHIALrf_-eYSyWCWiOyrHbcTXt_44/w640-h426/moon_LIGHT_Tv12s_200iso_5-6_20211119-01h53m06s704ms+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>I </i><b><i>love</i> </b><i>this one! The effect of the clouds is so cool! ISO-200, f/5.6, 1/2s. Pre-eclipse full Moon.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-a3O_u90837qCDULAu7vBn8AXUEkz-NeBBjliQWICkZnOWHkK5o4V-BRzuIUVbTFcsw67ObwT3AlKWT9Lz5q_qIk1_JLx3nzhevBos0zRJHXrsRc0ryuLxQCoqgi1Z-P3g0Hvy-siga0/s4960/moon_LIGHT_1s_200iso_5-6_20211119-04h58m16s784ms+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3307" data-original-width="4960" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-a3O_u90837qCDULAu7vBn8AXUEkz-NeBBjliQWICkZnOWHkK5o4V-BRzuIUVbTFcsw67ObwT3AlKWT9Lz5q_qIk1_JLx3nzhevBos0zRJHXrsRc0ryuLxQCoqgi1Z-P3g0Hvy-siga0/w640-h426/moon_LIGHT_1s_200iso_5-6_20211119-04h58m16s784ms+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Partial phase with clouds. ISO-200, f/5.6, 3s.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDXXVvZqVaF_03jrcxaJK9xpCh2-6_-R6eKbwV2gCQjpAPxjnRO4sIN__mZpdyfpvLZr0B3dOfh1CCttX5buRsjWeS61CuzKuHcxNyridHcfJCUCNQ5DuVNebOy6LC_Z6cHYo9OBlyRx0/s3196/moon_LIGHT_1s_200iso_5-6_20211119-04h18m55s397ms+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2131" data-original-width="3196" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDXXVvZqVaF_03jrcxaJK9xpCh2-6_-R6eKbwV2gCQjpAPxjnRO4sIN__mZpdyfpvLZr0B3dOfh1CCttX5buRsjWeS61CuzKuHcxNyridHcfJCUCNQ5DuVNebOy6LC_Z6cHYo9OBlyRx0/w640-h426/moon_LIGHT_1s_200iso_5-6_20211119-04h18m55s397ms+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Totality! Or as total as it got -- 97%. ISO-200, f/5.6, 2s.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_2PaB5xK-dpfPiuDDQsFQQPhPI5qtfe79MaXaAsbpTN14baZw4eqFAB6eokOaITP2K2ddg9Os4GHF5QCYZ7GVKIr70bAAfv75BdttEYk_DwNQcMExkToq0OI9uENgMNwoBeV3HaT6cLQ/s4657/lunar_eclipse_2021-11_arch+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3435" data-original-width="4657" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_2PaB5xK-dpfPiuDDQsFQQPhPI5qtfe79MaXaAsbpTN14baZw4eqFAB6eokOaITP2K2ddg9Os4GHF5QCYZ7GVKIr70bAAfv75BdttEYk_DwNQcMExkToq0OI9uENgMNwoBeV3HaT6cLQ/w640-h472/lunar_eclipse_2021-11_arch+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Trying to be creative!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-_4ndZu6bgp-IlazAQnVV8b9McEv78oLKI73hcRPwHZ_vDTQS4iFqsCSrmn_UMvtXovzQqmUUCiNcogvfd3eYUs5NpQW1wHkayp-Lsp4IAa6qT94tR3bHTfgvbyCiBZMgtP9QVZpWVs/s4073/lunar_eclipse_2021-11_curve+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2801" data-original-width="4073" height="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq-_4ndZu6bgp-IlazAQnVV8b9McEv78oLKI73hcRPwHZ_vDTQS4iFqsCSrmn_UMvtXovzQqmUUCiNcogvfd3eYUs5NpQW1wHkayp-Lsp4IAa6qT94tR3bHTfgvbyCiBZMgtP9QVZpWVs/w640-h440/lunar_eclipse_2021-11_curve+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqg0AjLpCDQpiCuU8tXywaFSBo20yip3Jd34HwOMPYNVgYK2ch2f1-s6PJS_2s_ZEMfLyenK1RDJgqCTuCTNOQnhLjKwPjxxLmblHBQ9bo0v1mqhECCM8zKMTLOm570HbLEUDlenAVVFs/s7008/lunar_eclipse_2021-11_line+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1388" data-original-width="7008" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqg0AjLpCDQpiCuU8tXywaFSBo20yip3Jd34HwOMPYNVgYK2ch2f1-s6PJS_2s_ZEMfLyenK1RDJgqCTuCTNOQnhLjKwPjxxLmblHBQ9bo0v1mqhECCM8zKMTLOm570HbLEUDlenAVVFs/w640-h126/lunar_eclipse_2021-11_line+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Since the Moon set not long after totality (and had to go through some trees and my neighbor's house first), I didn't get any good post-totality partial phase photos, but there are lots of ways to make cool composites even without them. I'm so glad I was able to set up so quickly and get good results! I've really got the process honed now.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2021/10/574-575-october-8-9-2021-hidden-hollow.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #574 & #575 - October 8 & 9, 2021 - Hidden Hollow Star Party</span></a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div></div></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a><br /></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><i><br /></i></div><br /><i><br /></i></div><br /><i><br /></i></div><br /><div><br /></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-53681923189252290292021-10-11T13:28:00.005-07:002021-10-11T13:28:26.865-07:00#574 & #575 - October 8 & 9, 2021 - Hidden Hollow Star Party<p> After a two-year absence, it was very exciting to return to the Hidden Hollow Star Party! It's a small star party up at the Warren Rupp Observatory hosted by the Richland Astronomical Society, south of Mansfield, OH. The weather is usually less than ideal, but it's only a two-hour trip for me, and it's a fun group of people at a nice summer camp location in the woods. One of the awesome things about Hidden Hollow is their enormous 36-inch Newtonian telescope, "Big Blue." It's a treat to look through between the clouds!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvPnhs5Y8TCyesP0ZEji5Ll48kFZ1CfdbNoV7KzapTac3erVgKcVcCvzT9e4brg55zRwO2f8GTy8j9NqFbwcNBY4VbheFELVrrNPzth9iYd4l3c_baKv57Mzce-tix1GGvnmUEyFGoLI/s2048/2017-09-23+10.15.12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvPnhs5Y8TCyesP0ZEji5Ll48kFZ1CfdbNoV7KzapTac3erVgKcVcCvzT9e4brg55zRwO2f8GTy8j9NqFbwcNBY4VbheFELVrrNPzth9iYd4l3c_baKv57Mzce-tix1GGvnmUEyFGoLI/w640-h360/2017-09-23+10.15.12.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Because the forecast was not looking promising at all, I decided to only bring one rig. I recently bought this awesome <a href="https://agenaastro.com/astronetics-zwo-eaf-asiair-mount-for-samyang-rokinon-135-lens.html?token=e054524b2d0312d6134ff436c99ea3d8f2037463&utm_source=yotpo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=map">3D-printed bracket on Agena Astro</a> for the Rokinon/Samyang 135mm f/2 lens, ZWO EAF focuser, and ZWO ASIAir. <div><br /></div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFqCOM0zwzWSdgSfCgs0mrSKPW2Gtis92CMOWOxe9rSF-voPbcVuRMLLilimwhw2y20m5qOvvq3UdVxCm7WMo2XF3CQEUGoop8qYVWFl8LtyG6KgVPiM4JP9Kp9yk1xiPnBwy92iQpR7g/s2048/20211007_181959+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1153" data-original-width="2048" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFqCOM0zwzWSdgSfCgs0mrSKPW2Gtis92CMOWOxe9rSF-voPbcVuRMLLilimwhw2y20m5qOvvq3UdVxCm7WMo2XF3CQEUGoop8qYVWFl8LtyG6KgVPiM4JP9Kp9yk1xiPnBwy92iQpR7g/w640-h360/20211007_181959+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>I mounted it on my Celestron AVX. Eventually I'd like to get it running on my Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer, but for this trip I wanted slew control, target centering, two-axis guiding, etc. </p><p>What is all on this rig:<br />- Rokinon 135mm f/2 lens<br />- Red box: ZWO EAF electronic focuser. It's attached to a belt and notched circle that come with the kit to focus the camera lens. It works really well actually.<br />- On top: Orion 50mm guide scope + ZWO ASI120MM-S guide camera, as well as a red dot finder<br />- On the other side: ZWO ASIair Pro<br />- On the back: ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera + Starlight Xpress 5-position 2-inch filter wheel. Inside the filter wheel is an Astronomik L Type 2c luminance filter, Astronomik CLS-CCD light pollution filter, and Optolong L-eXtreme dual-narrowband filter.</p><p>Part of my goal for the weekend was to try using the ASIair to control the rig (except for the filter wheel, which is not ZWO and therefore can't be controlled by it). Unfortunately, while everything connected to the ASIair when I was at home, neither of the cameras wanted to talk to it once I got out to Hidden Hollow. I had brought along one of my capture laptops (a 2012 Lenovo running Windows 10) just in case, so I used that instead.</p><p>Here it is all set up at Hidden Hollow:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7wUQzEq0zuXr0wHkxpGolZbG2jS_npfZHmsyH5otu98TlTi2_UJ6QViApUWZ9vi8XNj9b2FxC0g-jhyphenhyphendY7UYmcN8kMA31-ClgqE1_4eVYWQq9in5GWa-dyGAitrTqEcbR_JjzW3v8OcE/s2048/20211010_100007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1153" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7wUQzEq0zuXr0wHkxpGolZbG2jS_npfZHmsyH5otu98TlTi2_UJ6QViApUWZ9vi8XNj9b2FxC0g-jhyphenhyphendY7UYmcN8kMA31-ClgqE1_4eVYWQq9in5GWa-dyGAitrTqEcbR_JjzW3v8OcE/w360-h640/20211010_100007.jpg" width="360" /></a></div><br /><p>Yes it's a bit of a cable mess, but since this isn't (yet) one of my standard rigs, I don't have a cable harness made for it yet.</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Friday</h3></div><div>I had originally planned on going out on Thursday, but the weather not only looked cloudy but also rainy, so I didn't think anyone would be there. So I drove up Friday instead. I brought my awesome little camper along with me. I forgot to get a picture at Hidden Hollow, but here's another photo:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioLP0VCt34EuG7Qz4JMRhTnejuI57ET-wQ_L9vdfScuK4_H1gobBo8wgdESCQQF7j48Bn2DDcrNXqjgXek-tjwTKWewYx7aGZC_ga3WOBX7NhmeVKhzLMvliv2YiYVpP_w-h1AEBHuq3U/s2048/2020-07-25+09.25.18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioLP0VCt34EuG7Qz4JMRhTnejuI57ET-wQ_L9vdfScuK4_H1gobBo8wgdESCQQF7j48Bn2DDcrNXqjgXek-tjwTKWewYx7aGZC_ga3WOBX7NhmeVKhzLMvliv2YiYVpP_w-h1AEBHuq3U/w640-h360/2020-07-25+09.25.18.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div>I drove my car up by where I planned on setting up and got unloaded and the mount built and balanced. After chit-chatting and greeting lots of people I'd seen in the past there, I finally snagged a few minutes to heat up a couple of bratwurst on the stove in my camper before it got fully dark. </div><div><br /></div><div>The forecast called for lots of clouds, but I was hoping to get enough of a northern view to at least get polar aligned so that I would be ready for any opportunity I had the next night to image. The sky was clear in segments, but they kept covering up the north star. Finally I got several minutes of clear sky up north to get polar aligned using SharpCap, woot! It actually cleared out a decent bit, so I decided to try some imaging and get whatever I could get. By the time I finally got polar aligned, it was about 10:30 PM, so my main target for the weekend, the California Nebula, was up and ready to roll. The AVX slewed there no problem being controlled by CPWI, but the plate solver wasn't working -- I couldn't get either PlateSolve2 nor ASTAP to work, they both kept coming back with "invalid solve" after only a little bit of searching, not the usual wide search they'll do. I uploaded an image to astrometry.net to make extra sure that the pixel scale I put in Sequence Generator Pro was right -- 7.07 arcsec -- and it was. While I was trying to think of what else to do, I went ahead and got PHD2 calibrated for autoguiding, and then more clouds rolled in. I decided to give up for the night because the clouds were coming in stronger and I was pretty damp from the high humidity.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Saturday</h3><div>Saturday started out foggy and cloudy, but cleared out later in the day. I spent the day attending talks on topics from meteorites to "spooky" celestial objects, as well as running around with my two DSLRs doing timelapse videos. </div><div><br /></div><div>By mid-afternoon, the forecast had much improved for the night! I went around exclaiming the good news.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQq-2vx0WIB7OtYoBYGhTP7wHUGrRKp5Ydzq9m7BWSAbRAc8dTpPkV1FVKJr8SdovhAQ-B9kNcp2Arq6CR-hLs7CyRvypUpSB3i_cP0ik2gZE4ZMBqJUEcI-upLJe8OgZiBbD7RJ-VUDU/s2640/Screenshot_20211009-180109_Astrospheric.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2640" data-original-width="1080" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQq-2vx0WIB7OtYoBYGhTP7wHUGrRKp5Ydzq9m7BWSAbRAc8dTpPkV1FVKJr8SdovhAQ-B9kNcp2Arq6CR-hLs7CyRvypUpSB3i_cP0ik2gZE4ZMBqJUEcI-upLJe8OgZiBbD7RJ-VUDU/w262-h640/Screenshot_20211009-180109_Astrospheric.jpg" width="262" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>In the Astrospheric app</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I got to give a talk in the late afternoon about my trip to Chile in 2019, which was a lot of fun and I got a lot of compliments on it. (You can see a version of that presentation <a href="https://youtu.be/SDv7ObPg-uE">here</a>). </div><div><br /></div><div>After my talk was the raffle drawing, and they had some fun and nice stuff this year. I put in for a waterproof case and some green laser pointers among other things, and ended up winning a fun Star Trek ornament instead!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtzrvGaKxtodArrXxrLqaEsucOKLG5WjzE7AGzUbXnwF1WEE4D49Hf04I7DstnkYZFJ3vVTW0Ebq7g1FkVuA61jJXY7OHvxxxEgE5DDIi8SGhc5I6liP-jIXhzF_kdIU7gQZRLmtRXYFs/s2048/20211011_133700.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1153" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtzrvGaKxtodArrXxrLqaEsucOKLG5WjzE7AGzUbXnwF1WEE4D49Hf04I7DstnkYZFJ3vVTW0Ebq7g1FkVuA61jJXY7OHvxxxEgE5DDIi8SGhc5I6liP-jIXhzF_kdIU7gQZRLmtRXYFs/w360-h640/20211011_133700.jpg" width="360" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Deep Space Nine version of Worf holding his bat'leth</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div>After having another quick bratwurst and some leftover pasta salad I brought along, it was time to get set up for the night. During twilight, I tried again to get the plate-solver to work, this time connecting my laptop to my cell phone's wifi to make sure that the plate solve catalogs were still downloaded in my OneDrive. I also shut everything down and rebooted. Finally, I apparently Googled the right thing because I had a solution in about thirty seconds: untick the "highest accuracy solution" button in PlateSolve2 when doing widefield stuff. Whoops! Had forgotten that little tweak. Finally, plate solving worked! The California Nebula wouldn't be high enough until 10:30 PM or so, so I did a short run on the Andromeda Galaxy as well. I hit "go" in Sequence Generator Pro about a half hour before astro-darkness and went off to go gleefully look through other people's telescopes.<div><br /></div><div>Saturn and Jupiter were on full display in the early evening, so I looked through a few scopes at them. Venus and the crescent Moon also made a brilliant display as they set in the west.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj77_EagPNNueEIX0rOzQyYdlQO5aJEmci8u7RjhSn2YAVkD1RGCK50Tjke3-HQ1mqJVoDxT3qlm6fU4MlNnX2Y5axuGHTaNwW22oPYYF1ltLJp-yypL8-Exrn_KNaumBMEs_GqabyBF1s/s2048/frame_0999_edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj77_EagPNNueEIX0rOzQyYdlQO5aJEmci8u7RjhSn2YAVkD1RGCK50Tjke3-HQ1mqJVoDxT3qlm6fU4MlNnX2Y5axuGHTaNwW22oPYYF1ltLJp-yypL8-Exrn_KNaumBMEs_GqabyBF1s/w640-h426/frame_0999_edit.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>I also looked at a few globular clusters and M82 through people's Dobs. One guy had a white night vision monocular that he had a visual hydrogen-alpha filter attached to. We took turns looking around the Milky Way -- you could see all of our hydrogen regions! It was incredible! All the nebula of the Cygnus region just jumped out, M8 and others in Sagittarius shone brightly, and you could easily see the Heart, Soul, and Elephant Trunk nebulae up north. It was so cool to see them at 1x magnification on the sky! Another night vision monocular was on one of the Dobs, and they were looking at M13 I think when I was over there. I snagged a few pictures!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhib8lMerWci1ZjhJyPmO4dnJk0UhHXa3P4YM-n2ndWG3XyEpRRBNN6bafisvmVxySrpnhyphenhyphenqVSzgeYukR4xUyI0PjYkFeWI9zbqLmSlSoAFqqVOlDzGdxc3D_EEiGOmddCdti7Bw8yS6jM/s2048/20211009_211958.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1153" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhib8lMerWci1ZjhJyPmO4dnJk0UhHXa3P4YM-n2ndWG3XyEpRRBNN6bafisvmVxySrpnhyphenhyphenqVSzgeYukR4xUyI0PjYkFeWI9zbqLmSlSoAFqqVOlDzGdxc3D_EEiGOmddCdti7Bw8yS6jM/w360-h640/20211009_211958.jpg" width="360" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I couldn't quite get my smart phone camera (Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3) to center on the eyepiece, but it was really cool anyway.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h3 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Looking through Big Blue</h3><div>Of course, you can't go to Hidden Hollow and <i>not</i> look through the 36-inch, 9-meter focal length monstrosity that is Big Blue! In order to reach the eyepiece, they use a scissor lift, which definitely takes some skill to drive around the dome. They have a computer and monitor up on the lift that is connected to a system on the telescope so that you can give it one alignment point and then slew the telescope to your target by hand with a distance counter on the monitor showing you how much farther N-S and E-W you have to go, and it's quite accurate. They also have a wireless remote up there to rotate the dome. It's a really awesome setup. But it is difficult to move the lift around the scope, and there is only a limited set of the sky you can look at because of the length of the telescope, how far the dome slit opens, whether you can maneuver the lift around, and the eyepiece location -- the scope is equatorially mounted, so the eyepiece rolls around out of reach in some parts of the sky. Most of the evening was spent looking at Jupiter and Saturn, which displayed an incredible amount of detail at that insane focal length and aperture. I could count more cloud bands on Jupiter than I think I'd ever seen before, and I could spot a small storm. Saturn had something like five moons on display for us -- Rhea, Iapetus, Enceladus, Tethys, and Dione, with Hyperion on the edge of the FOV. </div><div><br /></div><div>After everyone got their fill of the planets, they tried to move the scope to M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, but it turned out to be blocked by the top of the slit, which I guess normally opens further but wasn't that night for some reason. So I suggested we try the Ring Nebula instead, but that turned out to be too far west -- the eyepiece rolled over the top, where we couldn't reach it. I was up on the lift with one of the club members who was operating the scope, so I hurriedly scrolled through my SkySafari list to see what would work, and globular cluster M2 was not far from Jupiter, which we knew we could reach. Globular clusters are awesome in big ol' telescopes. I got to slew the scope and rotate the dome to get on target, which was fun! I found it in the finderscope, and then in the eyepiece, and it was awesome to look at. The club member (couldn't tell who it was in the dark) maneuvered the scissor lift, which was a tough job! It took us a while to get in position. It was a fun time. All the while, my telescope rig was running on its own, so I didn't have to worry anymore about getting sidetracked and missing a filter change or target change or meridian flip. Soooo nice :D</div><div><br /></div><div>Transparency had degraded, and everything was getting soaking wet, so most of the visual observers on the pad were packing up for the night. I was chit-chatting with a few folks, and felt like it must have been after 1 AM or something. But no, by the time I got to my camper to get ready for bed, it was only five minutes before midnight! I went to bed and got a nice long night's sleep.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Death of the D3100</h3><div>This weekend finally saw the end of my Nikon D3100, my first DSLR, as well as its kit 18-55mm lens. The lens started its death spiral about a year ish ago when I accidentally knocked over my other DSLR, my Nikon D5300, during a timelapse in my backyard in California, which knocked the front section of the lens out of alignment, but I was able to get it back into place. This time around, something must have broken recently because I couldn't get it back into place, and I couldn't get it to sit straight. Almost at the same time, I was looking through the timelapse images I'd just taken with the D3100 (which earlier hadn't turned on, but eventually did), and the shutter was only opening partway for the first couple frames, and then didn't open at all after that. I tried to lift it with my finger, but only the front plastic part was going up, not the rubbery second layer. I'm not sure how they're normally attached to each other, but I think there's something wrong with the little hinges in there. </div><div><br /></div><div>The D3100 has been a real workhorse. I bought it in July 2014, almost exactly one year before I got my first telescope. It's traveled with me on many hikes and a few backpacking trips, always hanging around my neck or shoulder. It was my first astro camera, capturing my very first astrophotos through my Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain on the NexStar alt-az mount of Saturn and the Lagoon Nebula, and has come along as a timelapse and widefield camera to star parties and astro weekends from Washington and California to Texas and Wyoming to Ohio and West Virginia. It captured wide shots of both the 2017 solar eclipse in Wyoming and the 2019 solar eclipse in Chile. Over the last seven years, it has captured nearly 130,000 images, according to the shutter count, which is right around the mean lifetime for the D3100. My second DSLR, bought in 2016, already has over 300,000 shutter actuations! </div><div><br /></div><div>It looks like I might be able to replace the shutter myself, or send it to Nikon for repair. I might just do that. My D5300 has been having trouble with exposure metering, so it'd be good to have a DSLR that can still do that. However, I had already been kicking around the idea of getting a new DSLR to replace the D3100 that has the computer control capability that the D5300 has...we shall see. </div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately on the lens front, they don't make that 18-55mm kit lens anymore. There's a VR (vibration reduction) version that technically works with my D5300, but the VR part isn't compatible. I found one of the same model as my kit lens on the used camera gear retailer KEH, but they just emailed me and said that it's not actually in stock after all. :( That lens I <i>definitely</i> need to find a replacement for ASAP! I'm open to suggestions...</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Results</h3><div>The sequence ran until about 4:30 AM, when the clouds and fog started rolling in in earnest, according to an all-night timelapse I had set up. I got 44x300s images on the California Nebula, and 22x300s on M31. Not too shabby! I also got nine timelapse videos that I'll be putting together into a single video with some music.</div><br /><div>The California Nebula came out all right. Using a narrowband filter with a fast f/2 optic is problematic since the light gets shifted a bit off-band by the optics (and stopping down the lens doesn't help since you're not changing the optics), which results in lower transmission. I was surprised at first to barely be able to see the nebula in subframes (it jumped out using an H-alpha filter with my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro on my C8 last year), but then I remembered this fact. It came out all right anyway, if a bit noisy! And since I forgot to stop the lens down to like f/2.8 or so, the coma around the edges was pretty bad. But I did get some nice color!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQffWzilXOJIagIpxABC2JX5aAN8V3sOUqOZlbkOJBBVVnQ-UGCLnMG3QUMcJptTlLhmslnNo80VekJg3pHaPQ4AUGEtjC6uwy3t0IHD4QVE4iUyL6NVEX1ed6Uw9fGiHaZXemKK31tpY/s2048/california_2_1_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1781" data-original-width="2048" height="556" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQffWzilXOJIagIpxABC2JX5aAN8V3sOUqOZlbkOJBBVVnQ-UGCLnMG3QUMcJptTlLhmslnNo80VekJg3pHaPQ4AUGEtjC6uwy3t0IHD4QVE4iUyL6NVEX1ed6Uw9fGiHaZXemKK31tpY/w640-h556/california_2_1_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div><i>Date: 9 October 2021</i></div><div><i>Location: Hidden Hollow Star Party, OH</i></div><div><i>Object: California Nebula</i></div><div><i>Attempt: 2</i></div><div><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1294MC Pro</i></div><div><i>Telescope: Rokinon 135mm f/2 lens @ f/2</i></div><div><i>Accessories: ZWO EAF focuser, Optolong L-eXtreme 2" filter</i></div><div><i>Mount: Celestron AVX</i></div><div><i>Guide scope: Orion 50mm guidescope</i></div><div><i>Guide camera: ZWO ASI120MM-S</i></div><div><i>Subframes: 38x300s (3h10m)</i></div><div><i>Gain/ISO: 120</i></div><div><i>Acquisition method: Sequence Generator Pro</i></div><div><i>Stacking program: PixInsight 1.8.8-8</i></div><div><i>Post-Processing program: PixInsight 1.8.8-8</i></div><div><i>Darks: 75</i></div><div><i>Flats: 25</i></div><div><i>Temperature: -15C</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><div>The M31 image had a few problems -- one was that I rapid-cooled the 294, thinking I had time for the frost spot to go away, but it stuck around for quite a while. Normally, to keep the frost spot from forming, I cool it by 5 degrees C over 5 minutes at a time. This works quite well, but I haven't figured out how to script it yet, so I have to sit there and do it. (And yes, I have recharged the dessicant). But here it is anyway:</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nW4BId2mIGn6xKti4r7BdEnEKkMDAGgJgGHiT7rOMzHdUdLuEPiE43Mxr0-lG-vlDxIQXMh89zWu5sOGeKL-ccVdgGquVQWFoC1l1mjonbC3s4QNCWz3vsAQybPSjM73G_nIOFZmd1A/s2048/andromeda_21_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1387" data-original-width="2048" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nW4BId2mIGn6xKti4r7BdEnEKkMDAGgJgGHiT7rOMzHdUdLuEPiE43Mxr0-lG-vlDxIQXMh89zWu5sOGeKL-ccVdgGquVQWFoC1l1mjonbC3s4QNCWz3vsAQybPSjM73G_nIOFZmd1A/w640-h434/andromeda_21_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 9 October 2021</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: Hidden Hollow Star Party, OH</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: M31 Andromeda Galaxy</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Attempt: 21</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1294MC Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Rokinon 135mm f/2 lens @ f/2</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: ZWO EAF focuser, Astronomik L Type 2c 2" filter</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: Celestron AVX</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Guide scope: Orion 50mm guidescope</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Guide camera: ZWO ASI120MM-S</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Subframes: 22x300s (1h50m)</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Gain/ISO: 120</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: Sequence Generator Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: PixInsight 1.8.8-8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Post-Processing program: PixInsight 1.8.8-8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Darks: 75</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Flats: 25</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Temperature: -15C</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Despite the iffy forecast, Saturday night was decently clear and a fun night. The whole weekend was a really nice time -- getting to see quite a few people I haven't seen in a while and getting to give a talk, and just enjoying some fresh air and camping and stargazing. It was a nice weekend, and I'm looking forward to next year!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBDSiQJDrhwAw8YWuIF7x8hNyB-ngWW1YPc7MBvqcN7cnIlPjQmq6tXfgEefTgc1DQy613o4XAW_uQ4xPRl3A-rliV1UnHbYZPC5SBOsoIsLtF-73y3JnsXLGWbeIygdJyvWaWzwRO3wI/s2048/20211009_191826.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1375" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBDSiQJDrhwAw8YWuIF7x8hNyB-ngWW1YPc7MBvqcN7cnIlPjQmq6tXfgEefTgc1DQy613o4XAW_uQ4xPRl3A-rliV1UnHbYZPC5SBOsoIsLtF-73y3JnsXLGWbeIygdJyvWaWzwRO3wI/w430-h640/20211009_191826.jpg" width="430" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2021/04/510-saturday-april-17-2021-new-off-axis.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #510 - Saturday, April 17, 2021 - New Off-Axis Guide Cam!</span></a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a><br /></div></div><br /><div><br /></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-80074276289186341092021-04-18T21:37:00.000-07:002021-04-18T21:37:19.881-07:00#510 - Saturday, April 17, 2021 - New Off-Axis Guide Cam!<p>On long-focal-length telescopes like Schmidt-Cassegrains (and especially Schmidt-Cassegrains, with their floppy mirrors), off-axis guiding can provide better guiding than a guide scope. I've been using an <a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2018/08/152-saturday-august-4-2018-testing.html">off-axis guider with my C8 since 2018</a>, and despite some troubles, it has still largely been a better solution than when I was using a guide scope.</p><p>I initially paired it with my QHY5 (the original red puck), but found it to be not sensitive enough to pick up guide stars, even at f/6.3 (1280mm). I picked up the more-sensitive QHY5L-II CMOS guide camera not long after, which typically gets <i>just barely</i> enough signal-to-noise ratio to hold onto a guide star on my setup. Of course, it performs better under dark skies, but any drop in transparency, and I'm barely holding onto a star, especially in the spring when the density of stars around out-of-galactic-plane targets tends to be a lot lower.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb_QoItnewzEeYyVw-mm4EJOtLLGDz92FZF1kjuoAA8EFYrngNfSbI8KAlPpvDSpNjueyu8q-psks8uIWhZlXL1azQJS76Ru-fZvVRO7K2LZmesV3d00mPXAYmv5PkIi7O69SMUbMlgmU/s1366/2020-02-23+%25281%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="1366" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb_QoItnewzEeYyVw-mm4EJOtLLGDz92FZF1kjuoAA8EFYrngNfSbI8KAlPpvDSpNjueyu8q-psks8uIWhZlXL1azQJS76Ru-fZvVRO7K2LZmesV3d00mPXAYmv5PkIi7O69SMUbMlgmU/w640-h342/2020-02-23+%25281%2529.png" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;">A good night of guiding in February...just enough SNR to hold onto the star.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">While the QHY5L-II worked more often than not for me, I started growing tired of losing images because of lost guide stars, and losing hours of the night while Sequence Generator Pro made attempts to recover. So I've been kicking around the idea of getting a Lodestar, which is a tiny CCD camera made by Starlight Xpress with big juicy pixels and high sensitivity. The current iteration of this camera is the Lodestar Pro, which was 8.6 micron pixels and 77% quantum efficiency. Unfortunately, it costs almost $600, which is a bit hard for me to justify when my system <i>mostly</i> works. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">However, I recently came across a used original-model Lodestar being sold by an area astronomy club member, so I pounced on it (along with an enormous 315mm electroluminescent flat panel and a network-enabled sky-quality meter). The older version of the Lodestar has 8.4 micron pixels and 65% quantum efficiency, so not a huge difference technically (several other specs are the same as well), although the read noise is lower in the new version. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The first thing to do was to make sure it would talk to my laptop. I installed the ASCOM driver for it, connected it to SharpCap, and it started taking frames right away. Woot! Shining light on it showed a response.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Focusing the Guide Camera</h2><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The next challenge was getting it on the off-axis guider. This is an <i>event.</i> Getting it focused is not easy. You have the three-fold problem of not being in focus, not having a star in the field bright enough to show up when very unfocused, and it's very hard to tell where the OAG is looking to get a star placed in it.</div><p>The first night I tried it, Wednesday, didn't go well at all. There were low clouds running across the sky, and once I got a bright star in my main camera and started slewing around to see if it would show up as a big unfocused blob in the guide camera, a cloud would inevitably cover the star. I gave up that night and went to bed.</p><p>Saturday night was much better, and had better transparency. Bonus points, the waxing crescent Moon was high enough above my lemon tree to see with my C8. A super-bright object is a lot easier to land in the guide camera because you can see it coming from off the edge. I slewed the scope over to the Moon, centered and synced it in the main camera, and then slewed above and below the main camera image to see where it would show up in my guide camera. Pretty quickly I could start to see the guide camera image lighting up, so I adjusted the exposure time down for seeing the Moon's surface, and got the guide camera roughly focused. I also created a field-of-view indicator element in TheSkyX where the Moon was in my guide camera compared to the main camera so that I could more easily land a star inside of it.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ThdWVLUbheMtLzat5AQrc7nP3DAGow5GK-a8GU8rzMUfUrwAIh6yZkD1INmGl9Eq1cuvBEkTmL3uQ88q9D2qVWUwqVv1YSV0osWF_Wp9cvHMIjvAkPupso-m4OQeqW_vXCdwqFmIymU/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="737" data-original-width="1368" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ThdWVLUbheMtLzat5AQrc7nP3DAGow5GK-a8GU8rzMUfUrwAIh6yZkD1INmGl9Eq1cuvBEkTmL3uQ88q9D2qVWUwqVv1YSV0osWF_Wp9cvHMIjvAkPupso-m4OQeqW_vXCdwqFmIymU/w640-h344/2021-04-18+%25281%2529.png" width="640" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i>The center rectangle is the main camera; the smaller one above is my old guide camera; the rectangles above and below are the E and W side of the pier positions of the guide camera, respectively.</i></p><p style="text-align: left;">Next, I slewed the main camera to Regulus and centered it, synced the mount to it (so that it would be in the correct position with respect to my camera FOVs on the map), and then slewed the mount so that Regulus would show up inside the guide camera box. And bang, there it was! Now time to critically-focus.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Now, I use two different brands of filters: Astronomik CLS-CCD & RGB, and Chroma narrowband filters. They have different thicknesses, and thus adjust the main camera's exact focus point a bit. ("A bit" on my PrimaLuce Esatto focuser is still like 20,000 steps). So to set the guide camera position so that it's mostly in focus for both focus points of the two sets of filters, I take the CLS-CCD filter's in-focus point and the H-alpha filter's focus point and split the difference. I set the focuser there in the middle of the two, and then moved the camera in and out until the star was as small as it would get. Now, since we're so far off-axis and this is a Schmidt-Cassegrain, the star shapes are pretttttyyyy yucky, so "in focus" is hard to determine. But I got it about as small as it would appear in the camera, and called it good. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Unfortunately, that focus point has the Lodestar just barely inside the tube! I put on a C-mount extension tube, but it has a lip on it that won't let me insert it far enough to get the camera in focus. So I need to hunt down an extension tube that doesn't have a lip. We'll see if I can find one. </p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwwYZUt0DYTyKEjpyP31sqadV91ntOZdhdw52zZfSwBl69RN39w8-gshBsEUIf1AxK9cAhT-qlTexyk6lxn7DUtxeOBG0NQoYR8DIQavufS65d2C6um9gtSApWVgvUJiE0YiF0E-S3YoU/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwwYZUt0DYTyKEjpyP31sqadV91ntOZdhdw52zZfSwBl69RN39w8-gshBsEUIf1AxK9cAhT-qlTexyk6lxn7DUtxeOBG0NQoYR8DIQavufS65d2C6um9gtSApWVgvUJiE0YiF0E-S3YoU/w360-h640/20210418_165252.jpg" width="360" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Left to right: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro, ZWO electronic filter wheel, 21mm spacer, Lumicon off-axis guider + Lodestar, PrimaLuce Lab Esatto focuser</i></div><p></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Time to Test</h2><div>Next, I needed to re-calibrate guiding in PHD2 for the new camera. I slewed the scope to somewhere roughly due East and about 50 degrees up the sky and started looping 8s exposures. Now, I had already discovered during initial connection testing that this Lodestar has a <i>lot </i>of hot pixels. And because of the way the camera is read out, some kind of interlacing to increase the speed, the hot pixels really look rather star-like. I did try to take a dark library in PHD, but they never work for me -- they always over-subtract, and I end up with a bright gray image with black specs where the noise pixels used to be. However, this is one place where the gross shape of the stars off-axis in a Schmidt-Cassegrain actually works out in my favor: they're way bigger than the hot pixels. After some trial and error, I set the HFD (half-flux diameter) minimum value in the settings (brain icon) to be 3 pixels, and this did the trick. PHD grabbed what appeared to be dim, blobby stars rather than the star-like noise pixels. </div><div><br /></div><div>The hot pixels really mess with PHD's auto-stretching algorithm, so I could barely even see the guide star. However, your ability to see it isn't what matters -- only PHD's ability to see it. This is given by the SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) reading. The higher the value, the better (until it says "SAT" which means you're saturated, which diminishes PHD's ability to calculate the centroid of the star). While I have been used to values between 5-20 on the QHY5L-II, the Lodestar showed values of 50-90, even in star-poor galaxy regions!</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhtVV82MwjPB3rwnV3cb4d9FumthnPSaQd9vLSW4CLiCzVHTbaz8ACBSwnWXzesYvwNAEojm2NN6Z17csfUiVBZs44VMTCZb7fFpaJevo3IvYAAfI5dtdnka5HASSk20atXQuYEEqtQrY/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="1366" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhtVV82MwjPB3rwnV3cb4d9FumthnPSaQd9vLSW4CLiCzVHTbaz8ACBSwnWXzesYvwNAEojm2NN6Z17csfUiVBZs44VMTCZb7fFpaJevo3IvYAAfI5dtdnka5HASSk20atXQuYEEqtQrY/w640-h342/2021-04-17.png" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div>This was very exciting and very promising indeed. So I got the main camera cooled and started running the sequence for the C8 for that night, which consisted of planetary nebula Abell 31, planetary nebula Sh2-313 (Abell 35), galaxy NGC 5248, and M16 Eagle Nebula. Abell 31 had some initial trouble with the guide star wandering off, but it was almost behind the tree anyway, so I had SGP just advance to the next target. Despite Sh2-313 being really low in the south for me, the PHD2 screenshot above was taken there, showing good SNR even through muddy and light-polluted skies.</div><div><br /></div><div>The rest of the night was quite successful -- all of my targets ran and got a lot of subframes, and it looks like the night finished strong with M16, which is in an area with plentiful bright stars to choose from.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQHXGgmWLsp1JWNzElLn1BmvTrBgT39u4pIoVaR7nd7AazpNBYLMgpwwM_bWMMk7CDbopT4dFEHrbvSKOACZG9dW90avA_Brl95HOxvx_8SsSKVZcFnA8Pc7mWfPFChu0cbPzDFrmySqk/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="1366" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQHXGgmWLsp1JWNzElLn1BmvTrBgT39u4pIoVaR7nd7AazpNBYLMgpwwM_bWMMk7CDbopT4dFEHrbvSKOACZG9dW90avA_Brl95HOxvx_8SsSKVZcFnA8Pc7mWfPFChu0cbPzDFrmySqk/w640-h342/2021-04-18.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />0.55 arcsec RMS guiding is pretttty good :D And so is that SNR and star profile!<br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKCPmEz-BqxsTX9RAMdu1RX-IJVquJSLM30GYaLFMaEMFMALWaeYnxie1UPJVENK0BULyj7aWHpyxPbydRezTEw2iUwKvJ7VBqRpefbejuCruqJf9da5I5AMlucy4lBXSaL8Q6RO-CYQg/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="561" data-original-width="762" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKCPmEz-BqxsTX9RAMdu1RX-IJVquJSLM30GYaLFMaEMFMALWaeYnxie1UPJVENK0BULyj7aWHpyxPbydRezTEw2iUwKvJ7VBqRpefbejuCruqJf9da5I5AMlucy4lBXSaL8Q6RO-CYQg/w640-h472/m16.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Single luminance (CLS-CCD) subframe, 300s, M16 Eagle Nebula, on the C8</i></div><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2021/01/457-monday-december-21-2020-conjunction.html">Previous post: #457 - Monday, December 21, 2020 - Conjunction Junction</a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div><p></p>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-53283618574729915632021-03-08T17:42:00.006-08:002021-03-08T17:45:41.528-08:00How I Organize My Data<p>Astrophotography generates a <i>lot</i> of data -- what is one to do? Between different cameras, telescopes, targets, months, how do you keep track? I've only been doing this hobby for 5-1/2 years, and I already have over 12 TB of data!</p><p>Everyone develops their own organization scheme, but I have one that I think is particularly excellent that I'd like to share. Maybe some parts of it will help you!</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">First and foremost -- keep a log book!</h2><div><br /></div><div>A logbook is an essential part of any scientist's toolkit. Take Adam Savage's advice on it: </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvvlAfjZyrCZT9ibBmz77PcfeQNyXJ2cCvKgKfkrVrjye5Cs7ELyl9GAuiRZpdbj0vyC3U615TZWzjOR63GcSKc0tAX8NKIZVKSkt7loqfi9ID-lA-F3cLM8y2FBzNzMHj9wtfT_CC9Io/s600/adam+savage.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="600" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvvlAfjZyrCZT9ibBmz77PcfeQNyXJ2cCvKgKfkrVrjye5Cs7ELyl9GAuiRZpdbj0vyC3U615TZWzjOR63GcSKc0tAX8NKIZVKSkt7loqfi9ID-lA-F3cLM8y2FBzNzMHj9wtfT_CC9Io/w400-h255/adam+savage.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Whether it's hand-written in a journal or notebook or typed up on a computer, it's important to keep track of some of the basics of every night you observe. What gear you used, weather conditions, things that went well, things that broke, etc. To make life easier for myself, I take notes in Google Keep's sticky-note-esque app (available both on smartphones and on any web browser), and then later dump all those notes into a Word document with more details. I number every night in sequential order, and I've been keeping notes since my very first night of observing! </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsv4avT-Ck6IZtJR-NcDfNpQ1hb0yTAwA_vdxZBqyAMVRsR6sZH_dXnEPeDJm_Vngj1Auziy_sNj8FiEpRXWDpfg37KNoo-tl8Mug8vUTIr4aaWHSkdL2dVtHkYFZTKZmDqhunXvLJ4xE/s611/Screenshot+2021-03-08+154519.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="611" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsv4avT-Ck6IZtJR-NcDfNpQ1hb0yTAwA_vdxZBqyAMVRsR6sZH_dXnEPeDJm_Vngj1Auziy_sNj8FiEpRXWDpfg37KNoo-tl8Mug8vUTIr4aaWHSkdL2dVtHkYFZTKZmDqhunXvLJ4xE/w400-h180/Screenshot+2021-03-08+154519.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Example note in Google Keep</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I have semi-permanent setups in my backyard, so my equipment configurations don't change that often, but if yours do, then make sure to write down the gear you used.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Image Organization: In the Morning</h2><div><br /></div><div>Every morning, I bring my data acquisition laptops (DAQs) inside (I don't have a permanent computer housing built yet) and pull all of the images off of them onto a flash drive, and then over to my desktop computer. I <i>highly </i>recommend <i>copying</i> the data off your laptop rather than <i>cutting</i> it; leave it on your laptop until you are sure it is safely transferred to your image processing computer. Sometimes storage drives can have weird faults that wipe all your data, or data can be corrupted. I check all my image files before deleting them from my DAQs.</div><div><br /></div><div>On my "Stacks" hard drive (an 8 TB drive dedicated to deep sky images), I have a folder called "Backyard - To Process." Within that folder are sub-folders for all of the targets on which I am currently taking data or haven't yet attempted to process. One folder at the top is called "_to sort" (the underscore keeps it at the very top of the list). When I copy the images off my DAQs, they go into a folder of the night's date.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_ryyZp4kGV_BGxJ02-jbeuvOZ-qH8EG4e3bUHuttqwoFOM3dPjpPcPdcieLzF57AqgiR6c2ymhyPkUYsiL6ay8B3h3Y5M_f4Dp9ioKjX96PALu3DSAGpTqMTqlZqCbdNeYX4HcS4RBWQ/s933/Screenshot+2021-03-08+155303.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="516" data-original-width="933" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_ryyZp4kGV_BGxJ02-jbeuvOZ-qH8EG4e3bUHuttqwoFOM3dPjpPcPdcieLzF57AqgiR6c2ymhyPkUYsiL6ay8B3h3Y5M_f4Dp9ioKjX96PALu3DSAGpTqMTqlZqCbdNeYX4HcS4RBWQ/w640-h354/Screenshot+2021-03-08+155303.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The older folders have planetary & lunar data I haven't had time to deal with!</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">After scanning through all of last night's images using the <i>Blink</i> tool in PixInsight (or if you have DSLR images, you can just open them using Windows Photo Viewer or whatever other image viewer), I shuffle them out to their target folders in the "Backyard - To Process" directory.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglWLSoZCKQZzgkpGWcuYHcFtcZs5_x0B0_O9V3EwpBE_lDoJtQZ43JdHDdpffHot7cRaFOfJizTanNhODBhd9aLmxqjm5IkbEdNA-zqDc1xESYoZbB4WVucx3DugJ2mdjRga7rbuY5c7s/s933/Screenshot+2021-03-08+155549.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="732" data-original-width="933" height="502" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglWLSoZCKQZzgkpGWcuYHcFtcZs5_x0B0_O9V3EwpBE_lDoJtQZ43JdHDdpffHot7cRaFOfJizTanNhODBhd9aLmxqjm5IkbEdNA-zqDc1xESYoZbB4WVucx3DugJ2mdjRga7rbuY5c7s/w640-h502/Screenshot+2021-03-08+155549.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The green tick marks are made by right-clicking the folder, clicking Properties, going to the Customize tab, and selecting "Change Icon." It's an easy way to spot which datasets I have deemed ready to process.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Inside each of those target folders is another set of folders: lights, cal, finals, and PixInsight. The light frames go into the "lights" folder (separated further by filter, if needed); corresponding master darks and flats go into the "cal" folder (copied over from my dark and flat libraries -- more on that in a minute); "PixInsight" is the folder in which I do my processing; and "finals" is where I keep final copies of the images.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH2ZirjORO2on5UfX9ohIoK5Z4GG0Sfuo5ULxQypLGVNvO462LKLnKjXOXkcPvgwNOrKYEcpiwCfWwHL6IzkooAJnSeO35BwAUSQ8wkyO_e2UZgzIDrceQvrovJX4m3Nll2BtGKzH8CNg/s527/Screenshot+2021-03-08+160249.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="110" data-original-width="527" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH2ZirjORO2on5UfX9ohIoK5Z4GG0Sfuo5ULxQypLGVNvO462LKLnKjXOXkcPvgwNOrKYEcpiwCfWwHL6IzkooAJnSeO35BwAUSQ8wkyO_e2UZgzIDrceQvrovJX4m3Nll2BtGKzH8CNg/w640-h134/Screenshot+2021-03-08+160249.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Since I use this template for every dataset, I finally wrote myself a simple batch script to generate these folders and a copy of my metadata text file template (more on that in a bit). They're very simple to make: create a new text file (right-click an empty place in the folder window, New->Text Document, and name it "something.bat" (no quotes). Open it with your preferred text editor (right-click, Open With-> choose text editing program). Mine looks like this:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">mkdir lights</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">mkdir cal</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">mkdir finals</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">mkdir PixInsight</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">mkdir PixInsight\processes</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">copy "Q:\_Stacks\stats format.txt" finals</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">ren "finals\stats format.txt" stats.txt</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">"mkdir" means "create directory;" "copy" means, well, copy (first argument is "copy from" location, second argument is "copy to" location); and "ren" means "rename" (first argument is the file location and name that you want to rename, the second is what you want to rename it to). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">To execute the batch file, copy it into the folder you want to make the folders in and double-click it. It will run quickly, and then you can delete the copy of the batch file. If you want to get even fancier and move all existing images into the "lights" folder, you can add:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">move *.fit lights</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">where the * means "all files with" and the .fit is the image extension my images files are saved as.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Don't forget, if you have a directory or filename that has spaces in its name, you need to put the whole filepath in quotes (like I did in the "copy" line above). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Linux and Mac have different commands, but a similar idea. (If you use Linux, I hope you already know how to do this!)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Image Organization: Each Dataset</h2><div><br /></div><div>First, I have a different hard drive for each type of data: deep sky, planetary, timelapse, and miscellaneous (this has nightscapes, images collected for competitions, solar/lunar eclipses, other people's data that I've helped them process, pictures of my telescope setups, and whatever else doesn't have a home). Having different hard drives is just a result of having too much data to fit on a single drive, so I broke it up my logical categories.</div><div><br /></div><div>In general, I organize my data in this hierarchy: target, attempt. Inside each attempt is the same setup as in "Backyard - To Process," with the cal, lights, finals, and PixInsight folders.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYemvgN1ME4KP8ZKoCDXSnljrwtzplD0TWd4h0AY8hBfSvlyzoyPHKqmatpdGGpxpkqUejS1AwyKFMEmRgH3HAQbI9eMhFm0EnO86AeLDjIyiafMuMqoGPbROZ-sQZvyc-xWyijZ6VlXY/s938/Screenshot+2021-03-08+160345.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="733" data-original-width="938" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYemvgN1ME4KP8ZKoCDXSnljrwtzplD0TWd4h0AY8hBfSvlyzoyPHKqmatpdGGpxpkqUejS1AwyKFMEmRgH3HAQbI9eMhFm0EnO86AeLDjIyiafMuMqoGPbROZ-sQZvyc-xWyijZ6VlXY/w640-h500/Screenshot+2021-03-08+160345.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div>An "attempt" on a target can be one night, or many nights, but it's all the data I am going to combine into a single, final image. Occasionally, I go back and combine multiple datasets; those combinations would go into the most recent attempt folder that is included in that combination. For example, if I combine data from Lagoon #4 and Lagoon #5, the processing steps and final images would go into the Lagoon #5 folder.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Metadata File</h3><div><br /></div><div>Even if you are young with a more keen mind, once you get enough datasets rolling, it becomes easy to forget which gear you used, where you took the images, etc. The best way to combat that is to write it down and keep it with that dataset. In the "finals" folder, I make a simple text file called "stats.txt" that holds all that info in a standardized template I developed. Text files are nice because they are readable on every platform, for free, and will be for a very long time. My preferred app is Notepad++, but you can even just use the simple Notepad app that's built into Windows, or vim on Linux if you really hate yourself, or whatever text editor you prefer.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigFXoJA1XBzdcw0qod2qEvQ-SAfbdeM8u_E53s0xiMx4zVDM8b57AyrJNteRABi8I3yAXnS5de-rQUXPWgmGK__kdCLepPEh2HALZEzJxISfX7_we-zReEobI86WFzyp587I1csS9UOeo/s934/Screenshot+2021-03-08+161043.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="934" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigFXoJA1XBzdcw0qod2qEvQ-SAfbdeM8u_E53s0xiMx4zVDM8b57AyrJNteRABi8I3yAXnS5de-rQUXPWgmGK__kdCLepPEh2HALZEzJxISfX7_we-zReEobI86WFzyp587I1csS9UOeo/w640-h338/Screenshot+2021-03-08+161043.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div>In addition to having a text file with each dataset, I also have a summary of all of these text files for easy searching in an Excel spreadsheet. It's sortable and filterable, so I can quickly do things like find which target attempt uses compatible gear to combine datasets; find example images for creating comparisons between telescopes, cameras, techniques, etc; see when the last time I imaged a target was; see if I need to re-do a target now that I have better skills; all sorts of things. It's also handy for when I'm at a star party or outreach event and someone asks, "How long was this exposure?" or "What telescope/camera did you use?" and I can quickly go look it up from my phone.<br /><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqmo4WfUSsUt-CCZDISMih9mmGZFhMtIVMoVnUNfNtuToaBDTwcmfAYaj_prI3w9A3Ft7qTCR_3fb5vkt7Zli7rn4oqibOtvYNNNacoj2_It_2omsFrFc7GB_S-FLqh91QYUK4k4AHIag/s1919/Screenshot+2021-03-08+161517.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="1919" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqmo4WfUSsUt-CCZDISMih9mmGZFhMtIVMoVnUNfNtuToaBDTwcmfAYaj_prI3w9A3Ft7qTCR_3fb5vkt7Zli7rn4oqibOtvYNNNacoj2_It_2omsFrFc7GB_S-FLqh91QYUK4k4AHIag/w640-h346/Screenshot+2021-03-08+161517.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Green highlight means "re-process with more skill;" yellow highlight means "need more data."</i></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Processing Files</h3><div><br /></div><div>Inside the "PixInsight" folder in the attempt folder, I have more folders that contain my processing steps. I number them sequentially so that it's easier to go back and re-do steps if I don't like the result.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1ezPBS_EfHTPRN8sLkH3A2hFhLduPnNlsGOr4MpUvDC72wY5GcWIEu6BGlSkkqWLK1DpaxGWWSAzgA0kVFr-vY5AmsNYQZtjthYvsEULAxZpax9BHVrtdbt4A3Ys_3H_lv7DcYQAVKTs/s935/Screenshot+2021-03-08+162830.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="726" data-original-width="935" height="496" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1ezPBS_EfHTPRN8sLkH3A2hFhLduPnNlsGOr4MpUvDC72wY5GcWIEu6BGlSkkqWLK1DpaxGWWSAzgA0kVFr-vY5AmsNYQZtjthYvsEULAxZpax9BHVrtdbt4A3Ys_3H_lv7DcYQAVKTs/w640-h496/Screenshot+2021-03-08+162830.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div>In addition, I keep notes in the metadata file with what processing steps I used and some details about them as needed (what type of pixel rejection I used in stacking, how many iterations of deconvolution I did, which subframe I used as the reference frame for registration, etc). </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Deleting Data</h3><div><br /></div><div>I never delete entire datasets, even if they seem like crap. For one, they might actually be fine, but I don't have the skill to process them yet. Or, if they truly are crap, they make useful teaching examples about how to spot clouds and bad tracing, or can even help diagnose problems with your gear, like frost spots or burrs on a gear. (I do delete bad subframes in a single dataset, although sometimes I set them aside for further analysis or using as examples). It's also fun to go back and see how bad my images used to be and how far I've come :)</div><div><br /></div><div>To keep dataset size down, once I'm done processing, I delete all of the pre-processing data: calibrated, approved (from <i>SubframeSelector</i>), debayered, and registered subframes. But I keep the original stacked data to start re-processing from (I don't often have to go back and re-stack data after I've given it a few attempts), and I keep the matching calibration files (master darks and flats) with the dataset so I can easily re-generate the pre-processing frames if needed later on. This saves <i>enormously</i> on dataset size, especially now that I gather 20-30 hours of total exposure time per target these days.</div><div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">File Naming Convention</h2><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Subframes</h3><div><br /></div><div>I use Sequence Generator Pro to do my data acquisition, and you can program the file naming convention right in the sequencer. They've even got a little button with what all of the reference key symbols mean, and there are a ton of bits of information you can include in the filename. My personal preference is a filename like "ngc-7662_30s_-20C_CLS_f202.fit," which has the important pieces of information that change from image to image for my setup: target name, exposure time, camera temperature, filter name, and then the frame number. (I always use the same gain, offset, and binning, and I don't yet have a rotator to need the angle). I also like to have the images for a given target be stored in a folder of that target name. So my filename convention in SGP is this: "%tn\%tn_%el_%ct_%fe_f%04."</div><div><br /></div><div>Other metadata, such as RA/dec, gain value, and any other SGP knows because I've programmed it into the Equipment Profile (such as pixel scale, focal length, and more) are saved in the FITS header (which can be accessed in programs like PixInsight, FitsLiberator, and more). </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Final Images</h3><div>After I'm all done processing an image, it's time to save it out, in a couple of formats: XISF (PixInsight's preferred format), TIFF (for high-quality digital copies and for printing), and JPG (for posting on social media and keeping a copy of on my phone). </div><div><br /></div><div>The filename I give my finals files leads me straight back to where their original data are stored. For example, Orion Nebula #17's final is named orion_15_1_5. The convention goes: target-name_attempt_stack_process. Each new attempt at imaging a target increments the attempt number. Each different time I stack it (whether that's in different software, using different stacking settings, or mixing with other data) increments the stack number. And each post-process (applying different techniques post-stacking) increments the process number. So orion_15_1_5.jpg is the Orion Nebula, attempt #15, stack #1, process #5.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1T0uvjVuD6FuUa2Rb89MPEpuXkHwka9UhMSa-BNw7bziVss2rBmp-3zBOdy8wD9Ty4exjBqv49Hey3xtfhgJc7MZTkvU5UNrPM_VqtcP_v6WisBFnMA_zIEnXuTOwT-6fyCWY4y7tZt8/s935/Screenshot+2021-03-08+164538.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="730" data-original-width="935" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1T0uvjVuD6FuUa2Rb89MPEpuXkHwka9UhMSa-BNw7bziVss2rBmp-3zBOdy8wD9Ty4exjBqv49Hey3xtfhgJc7MZTkvU5UNrPM_VqtcP_v6WisBFnMA_zIEnXuTOwT-6fyCWY4y7tZt8/w640-h500/Screenshot+2021-03-08+164538.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>This way, when I have just the jpg on my phone, I can immediately know where to go looking for the image acquisition details (like exposure time, camera, telescope, location, etc) either in the metadata file or the Excel spreadsheet. (This has saved me after AstroBin's massive data loss event -- I name my images on there with their attempt numbers, like 'M42 Orion Nebula #15,' so it was easy to figure out which file I needed to re-upload!)</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Calibration Libraries</h2><div><br /></div>News flash: You don't have to take new darks and flats <i>every</i> night you image. You can generate libraries of files that you can re-use, depending on the circumstances.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Darks</h4><div><br /></div><div>With cooled cameras, it's relatively easy to generate dark libraries, since you can set the camera temperature (to within what your camera can cool to depending on ambient temperature). To build my dark library, I would set my camera out on the back porch, cover it a bin and blanket for greater darkness, run the power and USB cables inside, and then use SGP to run an all-night sequence of various exposure times at my selected temperature and gain. I've even taken darks in my refrigerator when I needed a set I didn't have and it wasn't cold enough outside to match some recently-acquired data!</div><div><br /></div><div>For darks, you only need new master darks under the following circumstances:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Different camera temperature</li><li>Different gain/offset</li><li>Different binning</li><li>Different exposure time</li><li>Different camera (even if it's the same model)</li><li>Periodically, as the electronics and sensor characteristics can change over time (my darks from three years ago no longer match darks I've taken more recently, so I'm having to re-do them, on my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro)</li></ul><div>In my "Dark Archives" folder on my Stacks drive, I have my dark subframes and master darks organized by camera, then by temperature, then by gain, then by exposure time. (If I binned, which I do for my CCD camera but not for my CMOS cameras, there would also be a 1x1 or 2x2 set of folders). Inside of each bottom-level folder (exposure time) is the master dark, as well as the subframes (so I can re-stack if needed).</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv87n5-BVnCyquVoE9s3vCpM9ONXq3ywZpEX9_tuwjrJ4OJu2Y0HchBDVNuhB1QLCNZNgp-GoPLJ-8bJWZ7SJ3T6rNhiA5aXZyO3pq2oqsMYtW88eVYDr1ZAReTzIlPAQZ4dkN3RYUi6E/s929/Screenshot+2021-03-08+165356.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="731" data-original-width="929" height="504" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv87n5-BVnCyquVoE9s3vCpM9ONXq3ywZpEX9_tuwjrJ4OJu2Y0HchBDVNuhB1QLCNZNgp-GoPLJ-8bJWZ7SJ3T6rNhiA5aXZyO3pq2oqsMYtW88eVYDr1ZAReTzIlPAQZ4dkN3RYUi6E/w640-h504/Screenshot+2021-03-08+165356.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Thanks to all my effort upfront to built up my darks library, I haven't had to take new darks on my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro in over a year. </div><div><br /></div><div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Flats</h4><div><br /></div><div>Flats are a little more complicated -- at least, if you have a non-permanent setup. Flats need to be re-taken under the following circumstances:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Different gain</li><li>Different filter</li><li>Different telescope, reducer, or other optic-train component (even non-optics components can change your flat -- like additional vignetting from a new filter wheel, adapter, or off-axis guider)</li><li>Different camera (even if it's the same model)</li><li><i>Every time you either rotate your camera or remove it from the telescope</i></li></ul><div>The main things that flats address are vignetting and dust bunnies. If you rotate your camera at all, you need a different set of flats because a) the dust bunnies will be in different places (unless they're on your camera sensor or window itself, of course) and b) the location of the vignetting may change since the camera is unlikely to be smack in the middle of your image circle, and because most sensors are rectangular. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>To deal with this, I organize my flats in the following hierarchy: first by camera, then by optics train (for example, "C8, focal reducer, Esatto focuser, ZWO EFW), then by date, then by filter. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkDpFdiw-JykCBJOx_3mp9o-OEfHo-PIpQuo1fFs53NmO4ucNgFhGkPOlPBAUe0wypuzv5pncQExOsCkUZ6Yo4GSRjDA2_-MU9p8VYAuPtf9JtNKcIu4cLFofbmZ1DOKypzKrCN69MZYs/s938/Screenshot+2021-03-08+170357.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="732" data-original-width="938" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkDpFdiw-JykCBJOx_3mp9o-OEfHo-PIpQuo1fFs53NmO4ucNgFhGkPOlPBAUe0wypuzv5pncQExOsCkUZ6Yo4GSRjDA2_-MU9p8VYAuPtf9JtNKcIu4cLFofbmZ1DOKypzKrCN69MZYs/w640-h500/Screenshot+2021-03-08+170357.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>Unless your telescope is in a laboratory-grade clean room, then yes, you will need new flats every time you set up and tear down and for each different filter. And to capture the dust bunnies, you'll need to be in focus -- so I always take my flats the <i>next</i> morning, after I've focused on the stars during the night.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Backups, Backups, Backups!!</h2><div><br /></div><div>Image if your astrophotography data hard drive failed tomorrow. How devastating would that be? Years of data and many, many hours of hard work, gone. Backing up your data is <i>vitally important.</i> </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Local Backup</h3><div><br /></div><div>For local backup, I have several external hard drives that I backup using some free software (FreeFileSync for me, but there are plenty out there) about once a month. Each external hard drive goes with one of my internal hard drives. They're also handy to bring to star parties for on-site processing when I only have my laptop. The rest of the time, they live in a fireproof, waterproof safe to help ensure their survival in case of fire. It's also important that they're not plugged in continuously so that they're protected from power surges and lightning strikes. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm eventually going to set up a NAS, aka a set of hard drives in some external hardware that uses a raid array configuration to mirror data to other drives to keep it safe from hard drive failure. All hard drives eventually fail, especially spinning-disk drives, which typically only have a lifespan of 3-5 years.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Online Backup</h3><div><br /></div><div>Local backup is still problematic; you can't keep a NAS in a fireproof safe, and you might forget to unplug your machine or NAS during a lightning storm (especially if they're frequent where you live!). Online backup allows you to store a backup copy of your data offsite somewhere, usually distributed across many servers around the country or world. They have better data reliability than managing a NAS or external hard drives yourself, and your data is safe if your computer or house is destroyed. </div><div><br /></div><div>These services come at a cost, depending on which service you go with and what type of service. Some services allow free backup, but it costs to download your data; this is known as catastrophic backup. Some services have different pricing tiers for the amount of data you can store and the maximum file size. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>I personally use <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/home-1.html">Backblaze</a>. It's $6/month for unlimited file storage, and it will backup continuously if you set it to. If you lose your data, you can either re-download it (which will take a long time if you have a lot of it, like I do) or pay to have them ship you a drive -- currently $189 for up to 8 TB (but they'll refund you if you ship it back within 30 days). </div><div><br /></div>The only issue with online backup I've run into so far is butting up against data caps. Comcast has a data cap of 1.2 TB in most states right now (up from the usual 1 TB due to the pandemic...woo-hoo), which means I can only upload about 800 GB per month because I use about 400 GB in my daily life (video calls, Netflix, YouTube, etc). You do get one courtesy month where they won't charge you extra ($10/50GB I think), and in that month I did manage to get about 4 TB uploaded, but with 12 TB of astro data + 1-2 TB or something of personal data and images, it's taking a <i>long</i> time to get backed up. I've been working on it since October (it's now March), and I have to keep an eye on my data usage and stop the backup once I get over 800 GB. It's a pain, but once the initial upload is complete, I should be easily able to stay under the data cap -- I probably only generate about 100 GB a month or so, depending on how much processing I do, whether I do timelapses, or whether I've been to a star party. :)</div><div><br /></div><div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Back it up!</h3><div><br /></div><div>It's worth your while to pursue both options. Imagine your life without your hard-won astro data!</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Conclusion</h2><div><br /></div><div>Dealing with so much data can be a challenge, but I totally love the system I've developed and it works great for me. I know pretty much exactly where to find everything, in short order, and I know everything about how I created that final image. Put some thought into how you want to organize your data and try it out. A little planning ahead can go a long way. I'm eventually going to write more scripts to do more automation for me (like grabbing the matching master flats and darks for my datasets!). </div><div><br /></div><div>Best of luck!</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a><br /></div></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-47218889433289862382020-12-22T11:46:00.001-08:002021-04-18T21:41:27.830-07:00#457 - Monday, December 21, 2020 - Conjunction Junction<p> It was one of the most-talked-about astronomical events of the year -- the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn! The two heavenly bodies appear close to each other from our perspective about every 20 years, but are not usually close enough to be a big deal. The last time, in May 2000, they were 68.9 acrmins apart, or a bit more than two full Moons side-by-side. This year, however, they would draw as near as 6 arcminutes apart -- nearly on top of each other. The last time they were this close was back in 1623, in the days of Galileo; however, the two planets were close to the Sun, so it is likely that nobody witnessed it. Before that, there was the Great Conjunction of 1226, in the time of Genghis Khan, which was visible at night. Luckily for us young folk, the next close pass of Jupiter and Saturn will occur in only 2080, which some of us may live to see. (For more info, see <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jupiter-and-saturns-great-conjunction-is-the-best-in-800-years-heres-how-to-see-it/#:~:text=For%20the%20last%20great%20conjunction,diameter%20of%20the%20full%20moon.">this article in Scientific American</a>).</p><p>I had put the event on my calendar some time ago, probably back in 2019, and set reminders for myself so I could prep. Of course, with all the chatter on the Internet, how could I forget? I started working up a plan back in the fall, and in the days leading up to closest approach, I did some test runs.</p><p>About a week before the actual night of closest approach, I saw on SkySafari that the two planets were close enough to catch in my refractor, and since it's positioned in such a way that I could see the two shortly after sunset before they disappeared behind the tree, I nabbed a video on my one-shot color ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera and produced an image.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9yoIEhkGZDUWIc6jEf5NyCsz5mbUDz2FXuroLStn9CCxeSvyVjlUga-haHwkY5bg6awEsqcy2gzEHFXv9ueYztb8mTOh6wwE4ko8rxMFtKDPemUYu0CBiiY2ZgWO9ze6hCJ7OlvpHn40/s2048/jupiter-saturn_2_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1602" data-original-width="2048" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9yoIEhkGZDUWIc6jEf5NyCsz5mbUDz2FXuroLStn9CCxeSvyVjlUga-haHwkY5bg6awEsqcy2gzEHFXv9ueYztb8mTOh6wwE4ko8rxMFtKDPemUYu0CBiiY2ZgWO9ze6hCJ7OlvpHn40/w400-h313/jupiter-saturn_2_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 15 December 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>UTC: 16 December 2020 01:34</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: East Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: Jupiter & Saturn, near conjunction</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1294MC Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106N</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: ZWO EAF focuser, Astronomik CLS-CCD 1.25-inch filter</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: iOptron CEM40</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Exposure: 15ms (Jupiter), 150ms (Saturn)</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>ISO/Gain: 120</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: PIPP</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Processing program: Photoshop CC 2021</i></div></div><br /><p>I couldn't get AutoStakkert to align the frames because of the two separated targets, so I just had PIPP (Planetary Image Pre-Processor) sort them by goodness and I pulled the best frame from each of the two videos (one for Jupiter and one for Saturn, because of the two different exposure times needed) and combined them in Photoshop. So it's a little blurry, but still cool to see them so close!</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Gear</h2><div>Because they were only going to be six arcminutes apart, I was going to be able to throw a lot of magnification at them and get a nice shot. I decided to use my Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, which has excellent performance on planets. It currently is seated on my Paramount MyT, and I've been using it for deep-sky imaging all year. Unfortunately, the Paramount was on the wrong side of my backyard to be able to see the conjunction, which was low in the western sky -- my enormous lemon tree blocks the view. So I went old-school and pulled my Celestron NexStar SE alt-az mount out of the garage, which I primarily use for outreach (back when we could do that in-person) and for planetary imaging that I can't reach from my backyard. The nice thing with using an alt-az mount for this transient events is that I don't have to polar align it or even have a decent alignment model -- I can just plop it down, point it at a planet, and say "track this," and it does a decent-enough job for the short exposures of planetary imaging. </div><div><br /></div><div>For the camera, I decided to use my monochrome CMOS camera, my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro. I always get better results on it, and I can get higher-resolution images from it because a) the pixels are smaller and b) every pixel is used instead of interpolating 2x2 quads of pixels to produce color images the way one-shot cameras do. The downside is that I have to be quick on the draw, changing filters and nabbing frames as fast as possible to get all three colors before Jupiter rotates appreciably, which is a timespan of about 90 seconds. Luckily, I'm quite practiced at it. I used my Astronomik RGB filters in my ZWO electronic filter wheel, and I removed the focal reducer for maximum resolution and magnification. </div><div><br /></div><div>The laptop I typically use with my <a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/p/my-gear.html">primary rig</a> is an old Lenovo from 2012, named Feynman, that I refurbed with a solid-state hard drive. It performs quite well, but only has USB 2.0, which limits my frame rate to about 1 fps full-frame. My other data acquisition machine is my Microsoft Surface 3 tablet, named Messier, which is also getting on in years and has been slowing down significantly, even after an operating system clean re-install. It has USB 3.0, but I knew I wouldn't be able to livestream from it, which I was planning to do with <a href="https://explorescientificusa.com/pages/about-explore-alliance">Explore Alliance</a>. So I decided to spin up my performance laptop, named Cherenkov, which is an MSI I bought myself for Christmas in 2018 for grad school use and star party on-site image processing use. I moved my table over, and brought out a light so I could be seen on camera, as well as my webcam and mic (the built-in ones on this laptop are terrible). I got SharpCap Pro and all my camera and filter wheel drivers installed.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlm0xRSWjYWaMO_r6Yyxui0_FzfInuOuJmTsWZ7Bn1B4HRL4hbgICFsZUjHm9V8a38FBiROZ-BwIp83lsjnMTKnRrr4czLVeAvgIi3bWrXUVz5daW5tOnDPbqc5diegk0KKer41TC8iIE/s2048/20201221_155602.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlm0xRSWjYWaMO_r6Yyxui0_FzfInuOuJmTsWZ7Bn1B4HRL4hbgICFsZUjHm9V8a38FBiROZ-BwIp83lsjnMTKnRrr4czLVeAvgIi3bWrXUVz5daW5tOnDPbqc5diegk0KKer41TC8iIE/w225-h400/20201221_155602.jpg" width="225" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Test Drive</h2><div>I tested out the whole setup on December 18th. After a couple of issues with not having all the drivers I needed installed, I got everything rolling, and got my Streamlabs OBS settings set up how I wanted. Once it finally got dark enough to spot them, I got the mount aligned on them and started imaging. Everything went pretty smoothly -- I have a lot of experience in getting set up now! </div><div><br /></div><div>Jupiter and Saturn were already close enough to image at prime focus, without the focal reducer! I had some trouble processing the images though still. I even used PIPP to do some pre-alignment, but still couldn't quite get it to go. I hoped that it would be easier once they were closer together.</div><br /><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Great Conjunction</h2><div>The night finally arrived! I had actually delayed by travel home for Christmas when I bought my plane ticket back in October so I could be at my house for the conjunction. Dedication :D</div><div><br /></div><div>There were some clouds in the west before sunset, and I was getting worried. But they were kind of patchy, so I hoped to at least manage some shots through them. Fortunately, they cleared out after sunset! Then it was just a waiting game for Jupiter to become visible so I could align the mount. I had moved it around since the test drive, so I had to re-align it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Since I had put the C8 back on my Paramount for deep-sky imaging, it was out of focus, which would make landing on the planets more difficult and waste precious time. So I picked up an moved the mount so that I could see the Moon and use it for focusing. Then I moved it back over to the spot for the conjunction.</div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, after peeling my eyes, Jupiter finally appeared a half hour after sunset. Showtime! I got the scope pointed at it and aligned, got them on the screen, and did some fine focusing. I immediately started taking videos as soon as everything was ready -- I wasn't going to have much time before they sank below the fence line. I also streamed the camera's view live on the <a href="https://youtu.be/pJx6FwSZezs?t=10622">Explore Alliance show for the conjunction</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>I had to move the mount back a few times to keep the planets in the scope's view -- one downside of such a large aperture is that even though the finderscope was still well above the fence, half the telescope aperture was below it, and the planets were dimming significantly. After getting a good round of RGB exposures, I took a luminance exposure to get Jupiter's moons, and then removed the camera. I had promised myself that I would look at them visually, and I am so glad I did! I threw on the star diagonal and 25mm Plossl eyepiece, and the two planets looked awesome side-by-side. It was super cool to see them so close together.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Result</h2><div>I finally managed to get AutoStakkert to play ball by having it only worry about the planet that had the right exposure (since I had to take two different exposure times for their large difference in brightness), and I got the red, green, and blue channels stacked for both Jupiter and Saturn. I used RegiStax to apply the wavelet deconvolution to sharpen them up, and then I used PixInsight's <i>FFTRegistration</i> script to align each set of RGB frames and combine them into color images. Then I brought them over to Photoshop to manually composite the Jupiter, Saturn, and Jupiter's moons exposures into a single image, and did some color correction and adjustments. The final result came out quite nicely, despite how low they were in the sky!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTW2PcBzzsqYJaCrcgmHa4nV1vnMSETUPlKFqKI3nn6zc6BKPlm8lQ1-2HUZ-vjZsG_JMOJP9CSZAeH0cdXg1Xiu4Kt5GfjYQBPF_olUnvHd0wzS5RxflLThGgDU0sceo_AYfDzgboz4/s1835/jup-sat_2_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1835" data-original-width="1775" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwTW2PcBzzsqYJaCrcgmHa4nV1vnMSETUPlKFqKI3nn6zc6BKPlm8lQ1-2HUZ-vjZsG_JMOJP9CSZAeH0cdXg1Xiu4Kt5GfjYQBPF_olUnvHd0wzS5RxflLThGgDU0sceo_AYfDzgboz4/w388-h400/jup-sat_2_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="388" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 21 December 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>UTC: 22 December 2020 02:30</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: East Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Celestron C8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: ZWO 2-inch 7-position EFW, Astronomik CLS-CCD & RGB Type 2c 2-inch filters</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: Celestron NexStar SE</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Frames: Best 20% of 250 each</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>FPS: 15</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Exposure: R: Jupiter: 75ms, Saturn: 150ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> G: Jupiter: 75ms, Saturn: 150ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> B: Jupiter: 125ms, Saturn: 300ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Moons: CLS-CCD filter, 100ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>ISO/Gain: 139</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: AutoStakkert 3.0.14</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Processing program: RegiStax 6, PixInsight 1.8.8-7, Photoshop CC 2021</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You can only see three of Jupiter's Galilean moons because Ganymede was in transit (but with our current angle to Jupiter, there was no shadow until after Jupiter was too low to see). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My prep work and practice paid off! I'm very pleased with the image I got, and I even got to livestream it. What a night!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Other Fun</h2><div style="text-align: left;">Not only was December 21st the night of the Great Conjunction, it was also the night of the first-quarter Moon, and only an hour or two after the conjunction, the Lunar X and Lunar V would both be visible! The last time I shot the Lunar X was <a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2017/07/35-friday-may-13-2016.html">accidentally when I took my very first videos of the Moon</a> using my DSLR on the very same C8 back in May 2016, and I had never imaged the Lunar V. So I took advantage of not having the focal reducer in place and took some nice Moon shots. I did move the telescope back over to the Paramount though, since it was going to be a clear night and I wanted to squeeze in another night of deep-sky imaging. The seeing wasn't great, but they came out all right.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMXMh0SLSiM9s5a1SBbGpUc7BPrEQvQTDONmUaxOjqjthJ4gToPRLNkeQqFC9VRMUM86FW_RUeyKiJknCeUS-6LjUsj-7fUCzZu58fH4H3wQ6loZIP-zss6EfsXVYzDIfMNdktB0qq1qY/s2048/moon_67-3_1_1++%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1558" data-original-width="2048" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMXMh0SLSiM9s5a1SBbGpUc7BPrEQvQTDONmUaxOjqjthJ4gToPRLNkeQqFC9VRMUM86FW_RUeyKiJknCeUS-6LjUsj-7fUCzZu58fH4H3wQ6loZIP-zss6EfsXVYzDIfMNdktB0qq1qY/w400-h304/moon_67-3_1_1++%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSUnGxEiUdIc7jSUUQEFzdj-kE3FfyBiVCByaDgZDUrM-xGmGNm68jgI_JGH5OSb5zprou0Uy5Y3oCSIkzvvk11NQ9ygAtQHb6MNvXQwd0ptE6c7YLolbHy63h1iFu4obMZVUf3MQr3ag/s2048/moon_67-2_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1611" data-original-width="2048" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSUnGxEiUdIc7jSUUQEFzdj-kE3FfyBiVCByaDgZDUrM-xGmGNm68jgI_JGH5OSb5zprou0Uy5Y3oCSIkzvvk11NQ9ygAtQHb6MNvXQwd0ptE6c7YLolbHy63h1iFu4obMZVUf3MQr3ag/w400-h315/moon_67-2_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 21 December 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>UTC: 22 December 2020 02:18</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: East Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: Moon</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Attempt: 67</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Celestron C8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: ZWO 2-inch 7-position EFW, Astronomik R Type 2c 2-inch filter</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: Paramount MyT</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Frames: Best 20% of 1,000</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>FPS: 33</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Exposure: 20 ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>ISO/Gain: 0</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: AutoStakkert 3.0.14</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Processing program: RegiStax 6, Photoshop CC 2021</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I even nabbed RGB videos of Mars before I put the focal reducer, off-axis guider, and focuser back on, although I haven't gotten around to processing it yet.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">What a fun-filled night!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2021/04/510-saturday-april-17-2021-new-off-axis.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">#510 - Saturday, April 17, 2021 - New Off-Axis Guide Cam!</span></a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2020/10/403-sunday-october-11-2020-planet.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #403 - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - Planet-a-palooza!</span></a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html">Table of Contents</a></span></div></div></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-53712718930606760322020-10-12T21:55:00.003-07:002021-01-17T14:50:46.439-08:00#403 - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - Planet-a-palooza!<p> We haven't had a whole lot of clear nights here lately, so I have been trying to squeeze in some partial-nights of imaging when I can. Unfortunately, the right ascension motor on my Celestron CGE Pro mount, the one I use for my science rig (for taking variable star and exoplanet transit data), has died. So there will be a bit of a break in the science-data-taking while I get another rig set up. After a talk I gave recently for the AAVSO 2020 webinar series, member Gary Walker, one of the leaders of the Instrumentation & Equipment section, offered to pass along to me a Celestron AVX mount as well as an older QSI 583 CCD camera. I'm very excited to receive both! The QSI camera should perform much better than the Orion Deep Space Monochrome Imager II I've been using on the science rig. My Celestron AVX can't quite handle the 8" Newtonian I use on the science rig, but I think I got one that's on the lower end of their manufacturing tolerance -- I've seen people do better with their AVX's. So I'm hoping perhaps his will perform better and I can use the Newt with it. Regardless, it will be put to good use -- I've always got some kind of plan rolling around in my mind. :D</p><p>Meanwhile, the plethora of planets in the evening sky has been taunting me for weeks! Normally I would set up my outreach rig and do some planetary imaging -- my 8" Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain on my Celestron NexStar SE mount. However, since I gave up on using my 11" SCT, I've been using the 8" all summer, and plan to keep it on my main imaging rig throughout the winter. So I decided to spend a few evenings on the planets, and I swapped out my deep sky optics train for the planetary one.</p><p>For deep sky imaging, I use a 0.63x focal reducer/field flattener on the C8 to decrease the focal ratio from f/10 to f/6.3 (making the scope "faster") while widening the field of view. The reducer puts me at an effective focal length of 1280mm, which gives me a large enough field of view to image most nebulae (except for the very largest ones), but not so large that I can't do galaxies and planetary nebulae. However, for getting the best resolution on solar system objects, you want a looooooong focal length -- as much magnification as you can get away with given the aperture of your scope and the seeing conditions. I previously used a Celestron 2x Barlow, but always got a bit of chromatic aberration from it, so I finally upgraded to a Baader Hyperion 2.25x earlier this year, and finally gave myself a chance to use it. So I swapped out the focal reducer for the Barlow, and I also took off my PrimaLuce Esatto focuser because the last time I tried this, I had some trouble with it being too close to the scope and hitting the focuser knob. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjbra3dIXbFI_iO8BfpHfpKqWhyphenhyphen1i8INM57WRMyLmpbm-ikemI1H2bQGUbFAIaVaGijbjBSZK7BsUEKWoxZO5xu-zRHmimludQNHxE-0NdSiJg6FH0s8mDYIlxYGdYHptUzOIo8F3EPdI/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjbra3dIXbFI_iO8BfpHfpKqWhyphenhyphen1i8INM57WRMyLmpbm-ikemI1H2bQGUbFAIaVaGijbjBSZK7BsUEKWoxZO5xu-zRHmimludQNHxE-0NdSiJg6FH0s8mDYIlxYGdYHptUzOIo8F3EPdI/w640-h360/2020-10-11+16.53.08+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>From the scope: SCT-thread to 2" adapter, 2" to 1.25" adapter, Baader Hyperion 2.25x Barlow, ZWO electronic filter wheel, ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">First up: Jupiter</h2><div>After weeks of wildfire smoke, the air quality app on my phone reported an AQI (<a href="https://www.airnow.gov/aqi/aqi-basics/">air quality index</a>) of less than 10 -- a huge change from the 100-200 we've been having! And on the few nights it hasn't been smoky, there's been clouds and haze. But it was crystal clear, finally! Now I just had to hope that the seeing was good.</div><div><br /></div><div>The westernmost planet in the lineup is Jupiter, so I started there. I got several videos on it using SharpCap and rotating through my red, green, and blue filters before it slipped behind my lemon tree, and the seeing was decent, and the image came out all right! Bonus points: the Great Red Spot was prominently featured, and Europa was just to the side, about to pass behind the planet.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaGtDn618YFpVdkRqdqvPxL7kmPwVrQuo1mHjHzHXxfZN81iEl-fyXkRXSGkM6whRVa0KAIUpNMTi5d8O0EOSC0jPcq99OPLb6-SgNjj3VthfCr387QEAnC1VnaRgU8PldLL2gSMKT_i0/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaGtDn618YFpVdkRqdqvPxL7kmPwVrQuo1mHjHzHXxfZN81iEl-fyXkRXSGkM6whRVa0KAIUpNMTi5d8O0EOSC0jPcq99OPLb6-SgNjj3VthfCr387QEAnC1VnaRgU8PldLL2gSMKT_i0/w640-h480/jupiter_26_1_1_1+%2528larger%2529+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Date: 11 October 2020</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>UTC: 12 October 2020 02:14</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Location: East Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Object: Jupiter (and Europa)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Attempt: 26</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Telescope: Celestron C8</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Accessories: Baader Hyperion 2.25x Barlow, ZWO 2-inch 7-position EFW, Astronomik RGB Type 2c 2-inch filters</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Mount: Paramount MyT</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Frames: Best 20% of 1-2,000</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>FPS: 13-16</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Exposure: R: 60 ms</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>G: 60 ms</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>B: 75 ms</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>ISO/Gain: 200</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Stacking program: AutoStakkert 3.0.14</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Processing program: RegiStax 6, PixInsight 1.8.8-6</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">I am so happy that I took the time to swap out the focal reducer for the Barlow. Having the extra magnification is making this awesome! </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>One of 79 known Jovian moons, Europa was discovered in 1610 by Galileo and is one of the four moons easily visible with binoculars and small telescopes. It's a little smaller than our own Moon, but it has a water ice crust and thin oxygen atmosphere. Due to its very smooth surface, it is thought that a water ocean exists beneath the surface, which could harbor life. Future NASA missions are planned to explore that possibility.</div><div><br />We also have a nice view of the Great Read Spot here. The GRS is a massive storm that has existed for at least the past 360 years, when it was first observed. Within the cyclone, windspeeds can reach 268 miles per hour -- much higher than Earth's hurricanes. The storm is 1.3 times the diameter of the Earth!<br /></div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Saturn</h2><div>Saturn has got to be my favorite to observe visually. In my C8, it comes in sharp and clear, and it really looks like someone is holding a picture up instead! I've only come close to imaging it as well as I can see it visually <a href="https://www.astrobin.com/298984/">once</a> or twice.</div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, I spent too long on Jupiter, and Saturn didn't stick around long enough for me to get all three color channels on it, unfortunately. However, I originally set the scope up for planetary imaging on Friday night, although I only got Saturn before clouds rolled in. So here's the one from Friday:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNJcItdap-nLbrF377VJd9cVHnhLfkBrwXJh-0KRTLhVP-siiGI23IocDnEzfWS1ZVdcMQBHV_51EQOw-75WOG-Ek_a3BtTAXWXmlRLCcD7nSdMJa4-7OHT8Vkfo6YSOWyjfXCFlfglU8/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="780" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNJcItdap-nLbrF377VJd9cVHnhLfkBrwXJh-0KRTLhVP-siiGI23IocDnEzfWS1ZVdcMQBHV_51EQOw-75WOG-Ek_a3BtTAXWXmlRLCcD7nSdMJa4-7OHT8Vkfo6YSOWyjfXCFlfglU8/w640-h480/saturn_27_1_3-sharpen-stabilize_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 9 October 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>UTC: 10 October 2020 03:51</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: Easy Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: Saturn</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Attempt: 27</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Celestron C8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: Baader Hyperion 2.25x Barlow, ZWO 2-inch 7-position EFW, Astronomik RGB Type 2c 2-inch filters</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: Paramount MyT</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Frames: R: Best 20% of 2,002 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>G: Best 20% of 2,002 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>B: Best 20% of 1,848 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>FPS: 13</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Exposure: R: 75 ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> G: 75 ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> B: 120 ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>ISO/Gain: 300</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: AutoStakkert 3.0.14</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Processing program: RegiStax 6, PixInsight 1.8.8-6</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm always happy when I get the Cassini division and some detail in the cloud bands. And I love being able to see the shadow cast by the planet on the rings. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Neptune</h2><div style="text-align: left;">While I was waiting for Mars to peek out from behind my neighbor's garage, I went and nabbed a more difficult target: Neptune. I've only imaged it a few times in the past, but it's a lot easier to get into my camera's crosshairs on the Paramount MyT than on my Celestron NexStar SE. However, I need to make a better pointing model for the MyT; its slews are off by a decent bit, and I wound up having to sync on a nearby star to get Neptune in the image, which required me to go outside and actually look through my red-dot finder because the field-of-view was so small with the Barlow attached (only 13x10 arcsec). But I finally did get it in my sights.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1PsmlCS_nn8ZGogR1as1MqnJNcHFKutjE2K4Rxf31Wo_MBEQ88zJGvcde5-D5JZL3g6YB81GAtaIZP1pYp_X7Fy7p9eXnHFf41X18FDzk-KRcd20vWux845B0yASeMmrsHFtriS-OH9g/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1PsmlCS_nn8ZGogR1as1MqnJNcHFKutjE2K4Rxf31Wo_MBEQ88zJGvcde5-D5JZL3g6YB81GAtaIZP1pYp_X7Fy7p9eXnHFf41X18FDzk-KRcd20vWux845B0yASeMmrsHFtriS-OH9g/w640-h480/neptune_4_1_1_2+%2528300dpi%2529+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 11 October 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>UTC: 12 October 2020 06:22</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: Easy Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: Neptune</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Attempt: 4</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Celestron C8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: Baader Hyperion 2.25x Barlow, ZWO 2-inch 7-position EFW, Astronomik RGB Type 2c 2-inch filters</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: Paramount MyT</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Frames: R: Best 20% of 100 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>G: Best 20% of 100 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>B: Best 20% of 100 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>FPS: </i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Exposure: R: 3.5s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> G: 3.5s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> B: 3.5s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>ISO/Gain: 300</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: AutoStakkert 3.0.14</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Processing program: RegiStax 6, PixInsight 1.8.8-6</i></div></div><br />No gas cloud details for me -- it's just too small! At only 2.3 arcsec across, that's only 13 pixels wide at my pixel scale. But still, it's a bluish-green disk, woot! (Actually the camera didn't capture the color that well for this one -- I think it was too small to do the color calibration correctly. So I took a guess based on what I've seen in the eyepiece. It's not really right at all).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Mighty Mars</h2><div style="text-align: left;">Mars reaches opposition in October 13th, which is why it is so big and bright in the sky! Now is the best time to image it. Luckily for us this year, it's reaching opposition at a time of the year and time of the night when the ecliptic is also quite high in the sky -- it culminates at nearly 58 degrees high for me right now! Higher altitude = better atmosphere, since you're looking through less of it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I spent a good chunk of time on Mars, and waited around for times of better seeing. Of the 5 datasets I collected, #3 came out the best for me.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmVpkUlrCY0Wq5A_UKuQ6bqpO6W1Me6CSUlTs_lxuDznuFV_rHqu1_2YWygEXAfc5s-U6lMD2BqNvW9q-L1b3uUfrCpIxcB30GvCBTkzjbphMXhd8lVs60_b-bbPDDwOyIPvzjTwjRXl0/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmVpkUlrCY0Wq5A_UKuQ6bqpO6W1Me6CSUlTs_lxuDznuFV_rHqu1_2YWygEXAfc5s-U6lMD2BqNvW9q-L1b3uUfrCpIxcB30GvCBTkzjbphMXhd8lVs60_b-bbPDDwOyIPvzjTwjRXl0/w640-h480/mars_19_3_1_1+%2528300dpi%2529+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Date: 11 October 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>UTC: 12 October 2020 05:22</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Location: East Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Object: Mars</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Attempt: 19</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Telescope: Celestron C8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Accessories: Baader Hyperion 2.25x Barlow, ZWO 2-inch 7-position EFW, Astronomik RGB Type 2c 2-inch filters</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Mount: Paramount MyT</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Frames: R: 50 ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>G: 50 ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>B: 80 ms</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>FPS: 20</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Exposure: R: Best 20% of 2,004</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> G: Best 20% of 2,001</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> B: Best 20% of 2,001</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>ISO/Gain: 139</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Stacking program: AutoStakkert 3.0.14</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Processing program: RegiStax, PixInsight 1.8.8-6</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div>The reddish hue of Mars' surface is a result of the iron oxide that resides in the dust on the surface. Mars has a thin atmosphere, which you can see at the edges of the planet as we look through it edge-wise. It is believed to have had a much more substantial atmosphere, but since the planet lost its protective magnetosphere 4 billion years ago, the solar wind has been stripping it away. The pressure on the surface is about the same as being at 22 miles above the Earth's surface, and it contains only traces of oxygen. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br />Visible at the bottom of the planet is the southern polar ice cap, which is a combination of carbon dioxide ice and water ice. The darker areas have less of the red dust, which is why they appear darker. </div><br />I managed to get a fair amount of detail -- not the most I've seen from other imagers, but still cool! I'll need to keep an eye on the <a href="https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/outdoorsports/seeing/berkeley_united-states-of-america_5327684">seeing forecasts</a> and give it another go here in the near future.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">And finally, Uranus</h2><div style="text-align: left;">Wrapping up our solar system tour for the evening (very late evening) is Uranus. By the time I finished Mars, I figured I'd take one dataset on Uranus, and then finally get to bed. I've also only imaged Uranus twice.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1TIPdMXQvR8UuQSxOf0lPdDux7TdKXaJeicIot7hNNCCsj60wlRadNeex-wm7Sbc-Jbx7Nw14bNLobzpeqkvRbiUsrIq-k1IU_lnohBbSv_EacVjpUnOHyrwIQJgSPIKcYYOT93qvnsw/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="1920" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1TIPdMXQvR8UuQSxOf0lPdDux7TdKXaJeicIot7hNNCCsj60wlRadNeex-wm7Sbc-Jbx7Nw14bNLobzpeqkvRbiUsrIq-k1IU_lnohBbSv_EacVjpUnOHyrwIQJgSPIKcYYOT93qvnsw/w640-h480/uranus_3_1_2+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 11 October 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>UTC: 12 October 2020 06:53</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: Easy Bay area backyard, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: Uranus</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Attempt: 3</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Celestron C8</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: Baader Hyperion 2.25x Barlow, ZWO 2-inch 7-position EFW, Astronomik RGB Type 2c 2-inch filters</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: Paramount MyT</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Frames: R: Best 20% of 100 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>G: Best 20% of 100 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>B: Best 20% of 100 frames</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>FPS: </i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Exposure: R: 1s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> G: 1.5s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> B: 1.5s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>ISO/Gain: R: 300</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> G, B: 250</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: SharpCap Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: AutoStakkert 3.0.14</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Processing program: RegiStax 6, PixInsight 1.8.8-6</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Similar story here -- it came out quite gray, so I fuddled with the colors. But with both Uranus and Neptune, they're definitely disks, not stars! You can see this visually at the eyepiece really well, which is super cool :D</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Processing</h2><div style="text-align: left;">I need to update my planetary processing tutorial with my new methods, but until I finally have time to do that, here's the rundown.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Open the video for each filter in AutoStakkert; auto-place appropriately-sized APs, and then stack the best 20% of frames. (I have RGB Align ticked so that it aligns the next video to the last.)</li><li>Open the stacked images in RegiStax and adjust the wavelets. I prefer to do that in Linear mode -- I've gotten much better results with it.</li><li>Bring the wavelet-deconvolved images into PixInsight, convert to grayscale (RegiStax likes to save TIFs in RGB), and apply LinearFit to bring each color channel to about the same level (picking one of the filters as the reference).</li><li>Combine the three color channels using <i>ChannelCombination</i></li><li>Correct the color using <i>ColorCalibration,</i> with the whole image used as white reference and a preview box of the background as the background reference. (I have found this works very well for Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.)</li><li>Tweak saturation and the brightness curve with <i>CurveTransformation</i></li><li>Use <i>MultiscaleLinearTransform</i> to do a little more shaprening</li><li>Use <i>MultiscaleLinearTransform</i> again to blur the 1-pixel level, since some weird pixelated hatching tends to result from RegiStax's wavelet deconvolution that looks like debayering when it's not</li><li>Bring finished image into Photoshop to resize (I shoot my videos cropped to a small window size, usually 640x480, to speed up acquisition & processing and reduce file size). I usually change the DPI from 72 to 300, and then drop the auto-upscaled size from 450% to like 200-300%, and then do some denoising in Camera Raw Filter as needed. (This is mainly so that my watermark doesn't look super pixlated when the image gets blown up online).</li></ul><div>Planetary processing is much quicker than deep sky. I can crank through a dataset in about 10 minutes, including the documentation. There are probably some more techniques I need to learn to get the most out of the wavelet deconvolution, though.</div><div><br /></div><div>Planets are a fun diversion from deep-sky imaging, and they provide some quick satisfaction!</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2021/01/457-monday-december-21-2020-conjunction.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #457 - Monday, December 21, 2020 - Conjunction Junction</span></a><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2020/07/374-375-saturday-sunday-july-18-19-2020.html">Previous post: #379 & #380 - Saturday & Sunday, July 18-19, 2020 - Family camping, auto-guiding the Star Adventurer, and my new trailer!!</a></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.astronomolly.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html">Table of Contents</a></span></div></div></div></div></div></div><p></p>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-7946302811939677272020-07-31T17:33:00.004-07:002020-10-12T21:56:38.322-07:00#379 & #380 - Saturday & Sunday, July 18-19, 2020 - Family camping, auto-guiding the Star Adventurer, and my new trailer!!In the midst of COVID, time off has been pretty limited, mainly because all of the places one can go on vacation to are shut down in one way or another. All of the star parties I was planning on going to this summer were cancelled, with the main event I look forward to every year being the Texas Star Party. After a shelter-in-place spring break, with everything closed or cancelled, I haven't had any vacation time. So I decided to create some! I drove home to Spokane, WA to visit my family for a little over a week.<div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Drive home</h2><div><br /></div><div>It's about a 15-hour drive if you don't include stops, so I took it over two days. I spent the first night in a town called Redmond, OR, which is just north of Bend. It's a nice little town with a lot of new construction. As soon as I pulled in, I began scouting out possible locations at which to shoot Comet NEOWISE! It didn't take me long to find a good spot: there was a walking trail along a canal that runs through town, and a couple hundred feet down the trail, I found a spot that peaked through the trees to the right altitude & azimuth that the comet would be at later that evening. I mentally marked the spot, then got some dinner and hung out in the hotel room until dark.</div><div><br /></div><div>About a half hour after sunset, I took my DSLR, a couple lenses, and my tripod across the street and down the trail to the spot I'd found earlier. It was off the road, and I hoped the people in the houses along the trail wouldn't be too freaked out by a red-lamp-wearing shadowy stranger lurking on the trail, haha. I had to scoot down the trail a bit further to avoid disturbing a particularly loud dog.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXRew3rl8tbq3c9H2eFSPNO2f-5XL9-F37rCiG9-Mcxg4tIrKnEPXbvz4ZaYU5WeNn5AkeJV8_4G6mC6pe3b6wWYGkvoro3MxV7pF-RNpkAtrbBjPIFHaWAO7wF90LGCLUUd8k0v4foI/s2048/2020-07-15+21.05.32.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXRew3rl8tbq3c9H2eFSPNO2f-5XL9-F37rCiG9-Mcxg4tIrKnEPXbvz4ZaYU5WeNn5AkeJV8_4G6mC6pe3b6wWYGkvoro3MxV7pF-RNpkAtrbBjPIFHaWAO7wF90LGCLUUd8k0v4foI/w288-h512/2020-07-15+21.05.32.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>I wasn't sure how soon after sunset it would be visible, so I got comfy sitting on a rock and waited. And waited. And waited. </div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, at about 9:45 PM (so about an hour after sunset), I thought I spotted the comet out of the corner of my eye. I put my 18-55mm lens on and took a shot -- and there it was!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTeCyQOwsFgMClVMGbDzmhWMrCuZulnMZTt7bF7C7gA_2feZmsFeag8LZM8hJP2FJjZf2YcniRVlfE3IINEoOBfioacYMXxggwaHWCeYRxsw4gEIS2vVlRKY3RmxL6ppHoI_tCPCpHu0Y/s2048/DSC_0019.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTeCyQOwsFgMClVMGbDzmhWMrCuZulnMZTt7bF7C7gA_2feZmsFeag8LZM8hJP2FJjZf2YcniRVlfE3IINEoOBfioacYMXxggwaHWCeYRxsw4gEIS2vVlRKY3RmxL6ppHoI_tCPCpHu0Y/s640/DSC_0019.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Nikon D5300, 18-55mm lens @ 40mm, 3s, ISO-800, f/5</i></div><div><br /></div><div>As the sky slowly darkened, I got the lens focused, and took a series of 6-second exposures at 55mm focal length that I would stack later on. I took 62 of them, and then swapped out to my 70-300mm lens, set it at 70mm, and took another series of 5-second exposures (adjusted to minimize star trailing). Next, I set it to 105mm and took a bunch of 5s exposures, although the stars trailed a tiny bit. And finally, I did a nice zoomed-in 200mm series at 1.3 seconds.</div><div><br /></div><div>Due to the high rate of field rotation that far north, the shorter-focal-length images had steady stars near the comet nucleus, but pretty streaked stars farther away, showing obvious rotation. But the 200mm final image has nice, steady stars -- I didn't even have to process it twice to get steady-stars and steady-comet, since the comet was moving relatively slowly against the background of stars.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFLtfGozfyuTnKz887PAX6POMMsf7a0tpNjz4m9RELk24wBahY6w-kpfGfWKZ5oolhAXy2Ka6tNPVkMsljqf-8eFgSUKr15Tc8THS8euUawtf2IHGLlleqyk6enEM5V8A-MySAMKYtaUs/s2048/comet-neowise_1_1_200mm+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFLtfGozfyuTnKz887PAX6POMMsf7a0tpNjz4m9RELk24wBahY6w-kpfGfWKZ5oolhAXy2Ka6tNPVkMsljqf-8eFgSUKr15Tc8THS8euUawtf2IHGLlleqyk6enEM5V8A-MySAMKYtaUs/s640/comet-neowise_1_1_200mm+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div><i>Date: 15 July 2020</i></div><div><i>Location: Redmond, OR</i></div><div><i>Object: Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE</i></div><div><i>Attempt: 2</i></div><div><i>Camera: Nikon D5300</i></div><div><i>Telescope: Nikon 70-300mm lens</i></div><div><i>Mount: Tripod</i></div><div><i>Exposure: 49x1.3s, f/4.8, ISO-5000</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div>I finally called it quits at about 10:30 PM, since I'd been out there for quite a while already, and needed some good sleep to finish the drive the next day!</div><div><br /></div><div>Highway 97 through Oregon is a pretty lonely highway, and I've never seen a cop on it, so I usually speed through Oregon at a good clip. I managed to arrive home on Thursday afternoon just before my mom headed off to work. My sister and her husband are currently living at home as well, with one out of work due to COVID, and the other working only part-time. So I had somebody to hang out with while my parents were at work! They were busy doing other things though, so I just took a seat in the swinging chair on my parent's amazing front porch with a glass of lemonade and enjoyed the great weather until my dad got home early.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjclvnqNEP-FF1_WkZI6PdPplJz-CybVjeNYb_Y29447ztH4VJvXjdu14VhVx3IAfd32HwQjOV40t_L9SIpuam-7klxbgGySXLL7-rwo7CmZmnfvgQpvQzfbC4VZEWVpBTNppw8mSWMbj4/s2048/2020-07-16+14.27.11+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjclvnqNEP-FF1_WkZI6PdPplJz-CybVjeNYb_Y29447ztH4VJvXjdu14VhVx3IAfd32HwQjOV40t_L9SIpuam-7klxbgGySXLL7-rwo7CmZmnfvgQpvQzfbC4VZEWVpBTNppw8mSWMbj4/w288-h512/2020-07-16+14.27.11+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Camping trip</h2><div><br /></div><div>My dad took an extended weekend off of work and the five of us, plus my grandparents, took our two trailers up north to my dad's boss's property for a camping weekend. It was spitting distance from the Canadian border, and although I brought my passport in case we headed up that way, I'm pretty sure Americans aren't allowed into Canada right now! Crazy to think.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigsHoQjGSo67CGBQEmzApaSz4kY2JX-nbfzUy1dp-XbNknjwlyaIvPD7OsFyZbM3bo5WoXQciLhbjDEf2bCxVR_JXj7P4NSZfrbakBSpYvRI_Sup_fW6Lqk8LG59hOTrVLWJTQrFRZlkQ/s2048/2020-07-18+18.24.36+%2528clean%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigsHoQjGSo67CGBQEmzApaSz4kY2JX-nbfzUy1dp-XbNknjwlyaIvPD7OsFyZbM3bo5WoXQciLhbjDEf2bCxVR_JXj7P4NSZfrbakBSpYvRI_Sup_fW6Lqk8LG59hOTrVLWJTQrFRZlkQ/s640/2020-07-18+18.24.36+%2528clean%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>The family of my dad's boss have a whole house built up there in the woods along the Columbia River, as well as a giant shop. The shop has some sleeping and living quarters, but everyone wanted to feel like we were camping, so my parents slept in their trailer, grandparents slept in their trailer, and my sister & bro-in-law slept in their tent. My parents had told me not to bother bringing up my tent because of the sleeping area in the shop, but I didn't want to sleep there by myself! So I cleared out the back of my grandparent's SUV, laid down the seats, and slept in there on my air mattress (which I did bring just in case). It was a pretty tight squeeze, but I've been meaning to test out car-camping, so it was kind of fun!</div><div><br /></div><div>We did some lounging around and some fishing in the evening, and while the fishing was going on, you can probably guess what I was doing -- setting up gear! Since I drove up instead of flying, I could bring up whatever gear I wanted, but I decided not to bring a whole telescope rig because that far north, astronomical darkness only lasts for about three hours. So instead, I brought my Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer, ZWO ASI294MC Pro, and 55-200mm camera lens that I had attached to my Celestron AVX mount in my backyard. Since it was quite dark up there -- Bortle 2-ish -- I wanted to swap out the Orion SkyGlow filter for just a UV/IR cut filter. The Orion SkyGlow filter is SCT-threaded, so I needed a different solution. Working an M48-threaded filter into a camera lens setup is tricky, so I wound up putting my 1.25" Astronomik Luminance filter inside a manual filter wheel I haven't used in a white, which was nearly the same thickness as the SkyGlow filter for back-focus purposes. While I did measure it with my calipers, I didn't get a chance to double-check that it would come to focus, so I brought along some extra spacers and adapters just in case. (Different filters have different indices of refraction, which move the focal point around by a couple of millimetres). </div><div><br /></div><div>In addition to all this, I brought a couple extra things to do another experiment I've been wanting to do for quite some time, which was auto-guiding the Star Adventurer. It has two camera connection points on it, and I finally had acquired all the adapters I needed to put my Orion 50mm mini-guider attached to a QHY5 guide camera on it. The Star Adventurer uses ST-4 guiding, not USB, and only the RA axis is motorized, but my expectation was that it would at least help clean up the tracking enough to allow for longer exposures, especially if I was well-polar-aligned. ST-4 guiding works by plugging the guide camera into your computer via USB, running PHD2, choosing "On-camera" for the mount, and then plugging the camera via ST-4 cable (the wider telephone-looking one) into the mount. So PHD2 doesn't talk directly to the mount, but rather sends the command through the camera to go to the mount. It's an older, and largely obsolete, method of autoguiding (pulse guiding is much better), but it still works for mounts that don't support USB guiding! The major downside to ST-4 guiding is that because PHD isn't talking to the mount, it doesn't know what the telescope's declination is (which affects the calibration and the length of pulses it needs to send), so you have to tell it yourself, and re-calibrate every time you change targets (although I think Sequence Generator Pro can actually handle this). But since the Star Adventurer isn't a goto mount, just a "dumb tracker," I'm only doing one target at a time anyway, so it's a non-issue.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_vds_f-Iy72LRnAEWyZDTa_B9pq2JC98VofnyG0WJLf_QXMP5VPinNc0mh_xYUH9xhBBh_4-ifrQFNIhn6L-7UP3OcAmTscGazz4lcXxqhyphenhyphenaC2jvACUmV0n07f4LaQUpWhUdN_Q1qOJM/s2048/2020-07-20+08.01.57+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_vds_f-Iy72LRnAEWyZDTa_B9pq2JC98VofnyG0WJLf_QXMP5VPinNc0mh_xYUH9xhBBh_4-ifrQFNIhn6L-7UP3OcAmTscGazz4lcXxqhyphenhyphenaC2jvACUmV0n07f4LaQUpWhUdN_Q1qOJM/w288-h512/2020-07-20+08.01.57+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="288" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>There was power up there, but I forgot to bring the AC-DC adapter for the cooler on my ZWO camera, so I just ran that off the battery.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">The back deck was pretty shaky, but there wasn't a good spot on the pavement to see the North Star from, and the sprinklers were running on the grass (yes, they had a lawn, and yes, it had sprinklers...sheesh!) So I just told everyone to stay off the patio after dark.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Setup actually went pretty smoothly: I used the Polar Alignment app on Android (there's something like it on iPhone too I think) to plant the North Star at the right place on the "clock" in the polarscope for the time and date; did some star-hopping in the red-dot finder I had for the ZWO camera to land approximately where I wanted to image (the Elephant Trunk nebula up in Cygnus; it was dark enough that I could hop to the Garnet Star at the edge of the nebula with ease, and then guesstimate from there where to center the camera); set up PHD2 to guide in just RA and got it calibrated on the first try, and then just let it run once I saw the first 3-minute frame come down looking pretty good (after sitting <i>very</i> still). I couldn't check on progress remotely because there was no cell signal up there to create a wifi network to remote into my computer from, and I didn't want to rattle the deck by walking on it over to my computer, so I just let it be and crossed my fingers. Most of the frames turned out pretty well actually, and I imaged the same spot the next night as well.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">One of the benefits of camping so far north (48N latitude) was that Comet NEOWISE was quite high in the sky, sitting at 22 degrees high at 9:45 PM, and still 12 degrees high when it was nice and dark at 11:45 PM. My grandparents were very excited to see it through a break in the trees; it was fairly obvious naked-eye still that night, and looked great in binoculars and in the camera. I think the rest of my family got a kick out of seeing it as well. And I got some nice shots!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFlVEGjhBz1-ZLQbRW9my1ocHIvkm4zPEQl30acTom7poRBKDAZiKbeYJcFNWR5MAiEpnybJE8HmAfkcfC8vfMorlHPn7scEL6mFAm_splqQP0C9WMi2d5Tk6WhxDl65h0m9Uaww4up7w/s2048/DSC_0259_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFlVEGjhBz1-ZLQbRW9my1ocHIvkm4zPEQl30acTom7poRBKDAZiKbeYJcFNWR5MAiEpnybJE8HmAfkcfC8vfMorlHPn7scEL6mFAm_splqQP0C9WMi2d5Tk6WhxDl65h0m9Uaww4up7w/w512-h342/DSC_0259_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="512" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Nikon D5300, Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lens, 20s, ISO-6400, f/2.2</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>We had the lights from the town of Trail across the border to the north, but overall it was quite dark!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My dad and brother-in-law managed to catch only two walleye, but we prepared them and cooked them up over the campfire for some delicious fried dessert bites. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilk7VmtMthljhWtk1C4Bdu_J80BNDRM0yu-Lkq3yKSA6QJUiQp8ZhEgOWD2NCYBm088H9b1yMPJMMuvDmvEzZTpYVnX8a9Bfdn6Qzu7gZmPdjX0jFyX0Z1n-2XIgpGN-SpgH9-OkHqxq0/s2048/DSC_0030.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1365" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilk7VmtMthljhWtk1C4Bdu_J80BNDRM0yu-Lkq3yKSA6QJUiQp8ZhEgOWD2NCYBm088H9b1yMPJMMuvDmvEzZTpYVnX8a9Bfdn6Qzu7gZmPdjX0jFyX0Z1n-2XIgpGN-SpgH9-OkHqxq0/w342-h512/DSC_0030.jpg" width="342" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>My sister Mary's turn with the rod</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizBJNM1HsCdjH3nwPEpBs4aSUa7jjf7BfJmSJSTGyRU4vKHq6cVtuVGb_JfLnqx4seTNDCm-lpIc_hEetaRXCTTH3CSC3-aFQ5K860DOWaphizCToU67p970YPM1wXCpdp6cA-9ySmzHY/s2048/2020-07-19+21.12.09+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizBJNM1HsCdjH3nwPEpBs4aSUa7jjf7BfJmSJSTGyRU4vKHq6cVtuVGb_JfLnqx4seTNDCm-lpIc_hEetaRXCTTH3CSC3-aFQ5K860DOWaphizCToU67p970YPM1wXCpdp6cA-9ySmzHY/w512-h288/2020-07-19+21.12.09+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="512" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Parents & grandparents at the fire pit</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The weekend came to a close all too soon on Monday, and we packed up and headed back to Spokane. It was a really nice, relaxing weekend! And then I had the rest of the week to process my images, since I brought my laptop with me.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Imaging Results</h2><div><br /></div><div>The Elephant Trunk Nebula image came out pretty decently given that I just used a color camera and no narrowband! I was a little bit off-target in my aiming, but actually quite close for doing it by hand!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYMSUnfSJM26yGqjfliQbNA0BPJrIZp2-saV0Zm2vdvGWmXwiOaCmrjCNdsnN8mVla8nbL6xQVWp-9R7niSBxcO6r50mqkE38_IKXOQfUlOXgvKL4xsh1G78RTinF7fPJmo6i5EmR-B9I/s2048/elephant-trunk_4_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1395" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYMSUnfSJM26yGqjfliQbNA0BPJrIZp2-saV0Zm2vdvGWmXwiOaCmrjCNdsnN8mVla8nbL6xQVWp-9R7niSBxcO6r50mqkE38_IKXOQfUlOXgvKL4xsh1G78RTinF7fPJmo6i5EmR-B9I/s640/elephant-trunk_4_1_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div><i>Date: 18, 19 July 2020</i></div><div><i>Location: North of Northport, WA</i></div><div><i>Object: IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula</i></div><div><i>Attempt: 4</i></div><div><i>Camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro</i></div><div><i>Telescope: Nikon Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6 @ 200mm, f-something (toothpicks)</i></div><div><i>Accessories: Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter</i></div><div><i>Mount: Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer</i></div><div><i>Guide scope: Orion 50mm mini-guider (ST-4)</i></div><div><i>Guide camera: QHY5</i></div><div><i>Subframes: 18x180s (54m)</i></div><div><i>Gain/ISO: 120</i></div><div><i>Acquisition method: Sequence Generator Pro</i></div><div><i>Stacking program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5</i></div><div><i>Post-Processing program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5</i></div><div><i>Darks: 100</i></div><div><i>Biases: 0</i></div><div><i>Flats: 0</i></div><div><i>Temperature: -10C</i></div></div><div><br /></div><div>Now, the actual Elephant Trunk is hard to see -- if you start at the Garnet Star (the bright yellowish one on the left), and scoot directly to the right, passing over the U-shaped dark nebula, you can just see the formation of the tip of the Elephant Trunk before you hit the next streak of dark nebula to its right. (I recommend clicking the image to blow it up to see it). I got some red nebulosity, nice dark nebula, and pretty good-looking stars for this camera lens!</div><div><br /></div><div>I also ran around with my DSLR and 35mm f/1.8 lens to get some nice Milky Way shots!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZbsJzHuPk1gEJjLVwRHvnXSV1PS9U8P_W_lyy4rbA_9ur0jhEPR4zbHAGxG5hzbGOz-d3BOQad8fmTbeI2kuWJ_zwJ3CFUwRamcXDfoRzSmAVc6Ocy_cZQSfOPbLmR2gpTgipGPzmTi0/s2048/DSC_0088_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZbsJzHuPk1gEJjLVwRHvnXSV1PS9U8P_W_lyy4rbA_9ur0jhEPR4zbHAGxG5hzbGOz-d3BOQad8fmTbeI2kuWJ_zwJ3CFUwRamcXDfoRzSmAVc6Ocy_cZQSfOPbLmR2gpTgipGPzmTi0/w640-h428/DSC_0088_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Nikon D5300, Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lens at f/2, 8s exposure, ISO-6400</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>That's Jupiter peaking its face up from behind the hills there!</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">I also attempted some panoramas, which I haven't processed yet.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">At long last, the AstronoMolly-Mobile!</h2><div><br /></div><div>Back when I used to camp at my astronomy club's observatory grounds when I lived in the Midwest, I was usually one of the only tent campers -- most of the rest of the gang who came out had those fancy trailers. My grandparents lived in an RV for about 20 years after my grandpa's retirement, and my parents started trailer-camping a couple of years ago, but I am still perfectly happy tent camping. For regular camping trips, that is -- tent camping becomes more difficult when doing astronomy. This is largely because of getting adequate sleep; it's hard to sleep in when it gets very bright and very hot early in the morning. (Or very cold at night too, in some places!) And while I've been camping more times than I can count throughout my life, 7 nights tent-camping at someplace like the Okie-Tex Star Party sounds kind of not-fun. And now with bathrooms closed at campgrounds and other public places due to COVID, it's even harder. It is finally time to make a purchase I've been planning for a couple of years now: a trailer!</div><div><br /></div><div>So I drive a 2017 Ford Escape, the 4-cylinder 2.0 L Ecoboost variety, which is in the compact SUV class. Most compact SUVs can only tow 1-2,000 lbs, but the Escape was built on a truck chassis, and paired with the Ecoboost turbo, it's rated to tow 3,500 lbs. Now, since it is only a 4-cylinder, I was pretty sure that 3,500 lbs was not going to do very well, so my plan was to stick somewhere sub-2200 lbs dry. There are lots of soft-sided campers that fit the bill, but I didn't want soft-sided (both for protection from wildlife and holding in heat/cool). I also wanted a toilet of some kind, and there were some hard-sided A-frame-type campers I was looking at as well that had cassette toilets and pop-up wetbath walls. There are also plenty of small trailers out there, but most are 2500+ lbs, with probably too much frontal area to tow comfortably in my Escape (the manual says to keep it below 30 square feet). </div><div><br /></div><div>In my internet searches, particularly when I was looking for user experiences in towing with my car type, a brand I hadn't come across previously was mentioned quite a lot: Nucamp T@bs. They're little trailers, but not pop-up campers that I had been looking at before. After seeing what was available at the local RV dealerships, my parents and I went to RnR RV, which had a couple small trailers at their Liberty Lake location, and a couple more at their North Spokane location. We went to Liberty Lake, since it was a faster drive, and my grandparents had bought from them before.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the showroom floor was a T@b 320 S, which was little but packed with features, and only weighed 1900 lbs! It was perfect. The dealer took me out to the lot to look at a used version and another light trailer, but when we came back in, that T@b had been sold out from under me!! The used one was only one model year old, 2019, and was nearly the same price as the new one (they hold their value pretty well, like Subarus). So the dealer looked up what was available at their other location, and lo and behold, there was another T@b 320 S. But, even better -- it was this incredible white and red color! Super cute :D And astronomy-red! It was pricier than the more boringly-colored one there because it had the Boondock package, but we convinced him to lower the price to nearly-match the one there. It was terrifying and exciting, but it ticked nearly all of the boxes of both what I needed and what I wanted, so I bought it! :D They pulled it down to the Liberty Lake location, and I came back later in the week to pick it up, do the walkthrough, and have my car modified (replaced the 4-pin electrical connector with a 7-pin and added the electronic braking system control unit). It is perfection :D</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC6gZS0f-jwKk42ixeGO095DLKjLUsEHGkumBuy9NRVzrOk5cMtOa4RxM7CyD5YqXK3K5hZ1079K33UWkGp5HkN9LR4ultEtlsJ5N4sBwxbFVxVuF5KTBuD6jKIStVU_lOTuWfYiV5I6s/s2048/2020-07-23+16.20.36+%2528crop%252C+no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC6gZS0f-jwKk42ixeGO095DLKjLUsEHGkumBuy9NRVzrOk5cMtOa4RxM7CyD5YqXK3K5hZ1079K33UWkGp5HkN9LR4ultEtlsJ5N4sBwxbFVxVuF5KTBuD6jKIStVU_lOTuWfYiV5I6s/s640/2020-07-23+16.20.36+%2528crop%252C+no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOJ9X5WSAUn2JUuqjTtVMdKGDYOHEYPQQ0QUl4TPG-EXFP6S8ZbTlHP6aTEDiGNR5c-5Xjp7e-D7bfNFovSOe-tRzw1JjgawrOJ2elE0Uc2rtzG3YD5QmhLr0RvWfJCRQQ6Axuixc6rVk/s2048/2020-07-25+16.23.18+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOJ9X5WSAUn2JUuqjTtVMdKGDYOHEYPQQ0QUl4TPG-EXFP6S8ZbTlHP6aTEDiGNR5c-5Xjp7e-D7bfNFovSOe-tRzw1JjgawrOJ2elE0Uc2rtzG3YD5QmhLr0RvWfJCRQQ6Axuixc6rVk/s640/2020-07-25+16.23.18+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>It took me several attempts to get it backed mostly-straight into my driveway, but I did it!</i></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiheAuG5FRR-7pb-BCuZoa_jBSSASdzeKZKhSsnOBLBOSxSZsy0VKi7Idcqqxm0K7kNfKrSrBz5FB49GYmhKl8Z29sk2M8nBpeb-uA67eEPqA3cUNV9BDNXVKKbMbBMCe6aAj0ImFSL82c/s2048/2020-07-26+16.17.05+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiheAuG5FRR-7pb-BCuZoa_jBSSASdzeKZKhSsnOBLBOSxSZsy0VKi7Idcqqxm0K7kNfKrSrBz5FB49GYmhKl8Z29sk2M8nBpeb-uA67eEPqA3cUNV9BDNXVKKbMbBMCe6aAj0ImFSL82c/s640/2020-07-26+16.17.05+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The table is fully-articulating -- it moves in a circle, can be pushed and pulled to one side or another, and raises and lowers. It also can be removed and re-attached outside on the side of the trailer.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The back of the couch-seat there folds down into a space where, if I set up slightly diagonally, I can set up a place to sleep without having to take the table out, and there's still room to sit on either side of the table!</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Wfp0a53wkrzK60WJvRTXFCf6xn550KASun0Cv4znS8z5G93_4tFjsu2PVqQ2RhF_6KOaa7iEwswKiI9H3zvGSNE2W_CJqTh8XZqBvFao-vm3vUZ218bWkdH8SO41aAjP0CV-aCf2D2U/s2048/2020-07-26+16.20.05+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Wfp0a53wkrzK60WJvRTXFCf6xn550KASun0Cv4znS8z5G93_4tFjsu2PVqQ2RhF_6KOaa7iEwswKiI9H3zvGSNE2W_CJqTh8XZqBvFao-vm3vUZ218bWkdH8SO41aAjP0CV-aCf2D2U/s640/2020-07-26+16.20.05+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><i>That's a little TV there on the left, with air conditioning and heat/electricity/hot water controls above it.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The kitchenette includes a sink, two-burner gas stove, and 3-way fridge (AC, DC, and gas).</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>There are four windows that all open outward, and each has both a draw-down screen and draw-up privacy shade. The door also has a little porthole window that has its own privacy screen.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiefPfRaNH_XcU9TzSaYMj8VLGUETpSBD03N438-ZEgxWzakJGD3Pu9tc6U_a_iJcTHyEszQCrisDjGpCj2Je4MhwX6GHgSR89R_hTGJbxDAJJDAXh3CsKCFaJTIJZHeWJEC2UlruRQVLA/s2048/2020-07-26+16.20.19+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1152" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiefPfRaNH_XcU9TzSaYMj8VLGUETpSBD03N438-ZEgxWzakJGD3Pu9tc6U_a_iJcTHyEszQCrisDjGpCj2Je4MhwX6GHgSR89R_hTGJbxDAJJDAXh3CsKCFaJTIJZHeWJEC2UlruRQVLA/s640/2020-07-26+16.20.19+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Yes, it has a toilet </i>and<i> a shower!! I can't quite stand in the shower, so it'll be a seated shower whenever I do take one in there.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I've already had a bunch of my neighbors come by to admire it! It's just so darn cute!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As far as other stats go, it has a single propane tank and battery on the front, a reversible, multi-speed (and honestly pretty quiet) fan on the roof, a tankless water heater, no outside storage (but I'll be strapping a bin to the front to hold my hoses and electrical cables), a 10-gallon freshwater tank, 10-gallon graywater tank, and 5-gallon blackwater tank, AC power connection (30 amp), solar power connection (to trickle-charge the battery), racks on the back for other outdoor gear, and LED lights on the front and back for illuminating your site. Also, the cabinets are actual wood, made by the Amish. (The trailer included a picture and signed card from the crew that made them!). The outside is fiberglass. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Driving it home from Washington back to California went pretty well, actually. I had little trouble getting it on my hitch and all hooked up by myself the morning I left (thanks largely to my backup camera!). I don't really feel the trailer on city streets, and didn't start to feel it on the highway until about 60 mph, when the drag became great enough to feel. (The super-off-road tires I'm sure don't help with that situation!). Downhills were no sweat with the electronic braking system, but uphills made the motor work a little harder. I eventually had to just go 50-55 on uphills to keep the motor below the 4-5,000 rpm range. Engine temperature never left normal, but my gas mileage sure did suffer! I averaged about 12.5 mpg coming over the Sierras and then through the vineyards and desert-y parts of CA on the way back to the bay on I-5. So it took a little longer to get back, but really not too bad. (Although I definitely won't be going 80 mph on that interstate through Texas to the Texas Star Party next year though!). It only fishtailed a bit once when the road was a little rough and a gust of wind caught me by surprise, but it was easy enough to regain control by just letting my foot off the gas and not moving the steering wheel. I did a little reading, and it sounds like I can also tap the braking system control to apply the trailer brakes a bit to bring it back under control. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">All in all, it's the perfect trailer for singular me and the many astro-camping trips and star parties in my future!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHk7i95fdFzdS23W2C3a45P6n2td1-5kC3vx2brLuhfuwyJPu6kToWxGSJMYakUfFSzw_lQLU0Winv1kFYM79vWNj7HlF18ifLlwK_q8OvnYGL16hPWoiK6XFv56gZX4R6-jKPpR_68ns/s2048/IMG_20200723_130356633.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1872" data-original-width="2048" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHk7i95fdFzdS23W2C3a45P6n2td1-5kC3vx2brLuhfuwyJPu6kToWxGSJMYakUfFSzw_lQLU0Winv1kFYM79vWNj7HlF18ifLlwK_q8OvnYGL16hPWoiK6XFv56gZX4R6-jKPpR_68ns/w512-h468/IMG_20200723_130356633.jpg" width="512" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>The new AstronoMolly Mobile Observatory!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2020/10/403-sunday-october-11-2020-planet.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #403 - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - Planet-a-palooza!</span></a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><font size="6"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/06/359-360-saturday-sunday-20-21-june-2020.html">Previous post: #365 & #366 - Saturday-Sunday, 20-21 June 2020 - Astro-Camping Weekend!!</a></font><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><font size="6">Table of Contents</font></a><br /></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-71911669092824274052020-06-28T17:16:00.002-07:002020-10-07T21:17:29.083-07:00#365 & #366 - Saturday-Sunday, 20-21 June 2020 - Astro-Camping Weekend!!A little before 11 AM on Saturday, I was scrolling through Facebook and commented on my fellow astronomy club member Richard's post about his overnight trip to a secret dark sky site, expressing jealousy. Another astro-friend of mine from the Sacramento astronomy club, Cary, commented that he and a few others would be spending the weekend up at the Sacramento club's dark site, and he invited us to join. Needless to say, I was <i>extremely</i> tempted. I immediately began to think if there was any reason I couldn't go, but nothing came to mind. So I started packing!<div><br /></div><div>The site was at an airstrip up in the mountains to the northeast of Sacramento, about 2.5 hours away from me inside the Tahoe National Forest. I haven't camped since I moved out here to Berkeley last August, and my camping gear was scattered throughout the house. They had electricity but no water.</div><div><br /></div><div>I worked methodically through my mental packing list, going in sections: camping gear, clothes, food, and astronomy gear. It ended up taking me about 4 hours to get everything organized and loaded into the car, and another hour at the grocery store. But I finally hit the road at 4:30 PM. I have to say, I love my Paramount MyT even more now; it's so easy to tear down and set up! Just two pieces: the tripod and the mount. (Well, and the counterweight bar and counterweights, and telescope of course). I've got my cables all bundled up in cable wrap, and all my power cables and adapters contained inside a rainproof box, so everything stayed pretty organized. </div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The site</h2><div><br /></div><div>Getting to the site was pretty easy -- the airstrip is just off the freeway. It's currently only used by Cal Fire during wildfire season and by student pilots who practice takeoffs and landings there; there's no hangar, fuel, or anything else. There was, however, a cell tower, which was great because I got full bars of 5G on my phone :D I had prepared for not having cell phone access, but it looked like that would not be a problem.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYdxpHKsMu6nB6x0LSEFo8YWXMyMhEcLKkeuOjgz92D1-ANGCI-RACVE3lBQopvrbmohmVhEPw6yEkYE5MjV3l3Od8YpkEXvDwEZldJmFkN56Jtd6YKMyBdWX4w_LhOvOE79Yv47R9RGo/s4032/2020-06-21+11.51.10.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYdxpHKsMu6nB6x0LSEFo8YWXMyMhEcLKkeuOjgz92D1-ANGCI-RACVE3lBQopvrbmohmVhEPw6yEkYE5MjV3l3Od8YpkEXvDwEZldJmFkN56Jtd6YKMyBdWX4w_LhOvOE79Yv47R9RGo/w500-h281/2020-06-21+11.51.10.jpg" width="500" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Yay, Google has updated more of the Blogger UI and I can change image sizes again!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society and some of its members have several domes and roll-off sheds set up out there, which is super cool! There is a bathroom in the main building, but that building is closed due to COVID. The site is rated at the low end of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale">Bortle</a> 4 on dark-sky maps; the astronomy club members called it <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale">Bortle</a> 3.5.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifO7fQkn74Qfy6Z_a6Jyn8xFgpW0caOTK8jcP8hvur4HbBb7DABy2zJlg_uLRcRzsuo7Pop7bC2GJ_OeLZ1xISxds_zFdKCZYDLZCiUi7t2bDrwllxDqwX3lU0dMKh0pn7mdIBfBaTSQk/s2280/2020-06-21+17.53.40.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2280" data-original-width="1080" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifO7fQkn74Qfy6Z_a6Jyn8xFgpW0caOTK8jcP8hvur4HbBb7DABy2zJlg_uLRcRzsuo7Pop7bC2GJ_OeLZ1xISxds_zFdKCZYDLZCiUi7t2bDrwllxDqwX3lU0dMKh0pn7mdIBfBaTSQk/w238-h500/2020-06-21+17.53.40.jpg" width="238" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As soon as I arrived, I immediately got to chatting with the other folks who were there, and learned that everyone in attendance would be doing astrophotography that weekend. How fun! I had hoped for a few looks through people's Dobsonians, but oh well. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Setup</h2><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I started getting set up, and the MyT was built in no time. Another club member there had recently purchased a MyT, but wouldn't be getting it for a while, so I showed off all the cool features. One awesome hardware feature about the mount is that it screws onto the Helium tripod with just one large bolt, so if you're really off on polar alignment, you can rotate the entire mount without having to shift the tripod (which is difficult and dangerous when it's fully loaded, plus you lose your leveling). At home, I've been running my 8-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain on it, but with so few hours of darkness, I decided to bring my faster (f/5 vs f/6.3) Takahashi FSQ-106N refractor instead to do some larger summertime targets. I brought along my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro camera, ZWO 2-inch 7-position electronic filter wheel, and my Orion 50mm mini guide scope with my QHY5 camera that I leave attached to it because it's in perfect focus. The Takahashi has a Robofocus electronic focuser on it, although I didn't have focus offsets for my filters programmed for it yet. (Something I can do during twilight). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In addition to the MyT, I like to have little side projects to work on when I go out to dark sites to take advantage of the dark skies (or, sometimes, to get "consolation prize" data if the main rig doesn't work!). I brought my Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer camera-lens tracker mount, and my ZWO ASI294MC Pro with my Nikon 50-200mm lens that I've been running on my Celestron AVX mount at home the last couple weeks. Pairing the 294 with a camera lens <a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/03/273-thursday-january-9-2020-astro.html">is like having an astro-modified DSLR</a> that is also cooled. :D I've updated the layout of the rig <a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/03/273-thursday-january-9-2020-astro.html">since I originally wrote about it</a> back in January; I've swapped out the filter wheel for my Orion SkyGlow light pollution filter (one that's meant to attach to a Schmidt-Cassegrain that my uncle gave me a while back; I'm not sure it's meant for photography, but it's working out fine so far), and I swapped out the 300mm Nikon lens for my 50-200mm Nikon lens, which has a lot less chromatic aberration and field curvature. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSQwvOWVd_4bnIW4O8ZyjCiKVHBlBYHjDbs69PW2kjXeU_NjhXuUJy2Y4nxYrzRm8JfRXQHuHUoMvnzarTVYs06zCEtr0LYjB5mPryL_rfO2g1bTUORSCqbR2AzaBkXO6-v8-7nZfl2k/s4032/2020-06-08+20.47.39+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="2268" height="625" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSQwvOWVd_4bnIW4O8ZyjCiKVHBlBYHjDbs69PW2kjXeU_NjhXuUJy2Y4nxYrzRm8JfRXQHuHUoMvnzarTVYs06zCEtr0LYjB5mPryL_rfO2g1bTUORSCqbR2AzaBkXO6-v8-7nZfl2k/w351-h625/2020-06-08+20.47.39+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="351" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Also, I have a guide scope attached to it now, woo hoo!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In addition to all that, I also set up my Nikon D5300 DSLR on a little tripod and took an all-night timelapse.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW8b5gaLjAjM3gYrLnE7K5pMOvb8AxrV-ziYLAmem5G5kLeCWbPgzKUE42XvzwlGnHA5FNVXL5IITnkwvzFaFCm2qsHfvOmNxa-TMiPcvT4GL1v_7nzVLQjULEi9DitKshYo5Dg7dWVaU/s6000/DSC_0885.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="6000" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW8b5gaLjAjM3gYrLnE7K5pMOvb8AxrV-ziYLAmem5G5kLeCWbPgzKUE42XvzwlGnHA5FNVXL5IITnkwvzFaFCm2qsHfvOmNxa-TMiPcvT4GL1v_7nzVLQjULEi9DitKshYo5Dg7dWVaU/w625-h416/DSC_0885.JPG" width="625" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Shot from my timelapse; I forgot to get pictures of my setup!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">To polar align the MyT before I ran the re-calibration of the T-point model in TheSkyX, I opened up SharpCap and ran its polar alignment routine after finding a bright star by hand and using it for focus. (I keep a separate Celestron red dot finder aligned for each one of my telescopes to make this process <i>much</i> easier). After I polar-aligned, I ran the automated re-calibration routine on about 20 stars, and then used TheSkyX's Accurate Polar Alignment using Arcturus. Much to my delight, SharpCap and TSX agreed perfectly on polar alignment! This was quite exciting. I got all this done during the long summer twilight.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Next, I calibrated the autoguiding software PHD2, and got my sequence created in Sequence Generator Pro. Oftentimes when I'm at a dark site, I try to squeeze in as many targets as I can, getting enough data on them to have a reasonable image, but never enough for a great image. So I decided to focus on only one target this weekend: the Pelican Nebula. Located up in Cygnus right next door to the North America Nebula, it's a gorgeous region of gas and dust with a lot of really cool structures. The two nights were really short due to the summer solstice -- only about 5 hours of astronomical darkness each. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">PHD finished calibrating, and I connected the camera, mount, focuser, and filter wheel in Sequence Generator Pro, and hit the "Run Sequence" button. <i>And everything ran perfectly!</i> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>This is the first time I've run a mobile setup and everything worked the first time.</b> GUYS THIS IS BIG NEWS!! And I mean <i>everything.</i> Got the mount built, didn't forget any parts or adapters, all my devices connected on the first try, polar alignment and alignment were easy, PHD calibrated with no issue, autofocus ran perfectly, filters changed like they should, plate solving worked, and the sequence started itself and ran with no issue. If you spend any amount of time dealing with hardware or software in your life, then you know just how rare an occurrence this is!! But it hasn't come without many, many nights of blood, sweat, and tears! You'll notice that this was night #365 since I started doing observational astronomy; it has taken a lot of iterations, problem-solving, fine-tuning, and experience to get to this point. But boy is it paying off now!!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The sky</h2><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">With the main scope running smoothly, I took a moment to check out the skies. It was really quite dark! I haven't seen skies that dark since last year's Texas Star Party, in May 2019. There was quite a bit of light to the southwest from Sacramento, and a little bit to the northeast from Reno, but the southeast and northwest skies looked great. Clouds were dark in those sections, and I spotted M51 just off the handle of the Big Dipper naked-eye again, <a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2018/07/148-monday-july-9-2018-national-youth.html">like I was able to in West Virginia</a>. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The Milky Way glittered across the eastern sky, with the Cygnus region looking particularly dazzling. Toward midnight, Saturn and Jupiter burned brightly in the southeast, with Mars poking up from behind the trees. The Moon was new that weekend, so the skies remained dark all night.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi9dUarwJ8Y1vHFBjhMsPRSN5fJ7WthJJYDUh9HWZKGMoi2Q7RYNEhxmS33AU19Jdi8-_94CWfV4fjj6xGJ_9DmsGfYymlLI92HT08FKv9eZfwCYlPBEMko2GjvesH9dSQCulwN8Ut12Y/s6000/DSC_0256.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="6000" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi9dUarwJ8Y1vHFBjhMsPRSN5fJ7WthJJYDUh9HWZKGMoi2Q7RYNEhxmS33AU19Jdi8-_94CWfV4fjj6xGJ_9DmsGfYymlLI92HT08FKv9eZfwCYlPBEMko2GjvesH9dSQCulwN8Ut12Y/w625-h416/DSC_0256.JPG" width="625" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>My other DSLR, my Nikon D3100, was busy at home doing a several-week-long timelapse of my peace lily blooming, otherwise I would have brought it along with my 35mm f/2 lens to get more Milky Way shots. Oh well!</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">A little outreach</h2><div>One of the other astronomers out there that night, a Navy vet, invited up some young women he knew, three sisters, to check out the dark skies and hang out with us for a while. One was in college, and the other two in high school, I think. I talked to them for quite a while about all things astronomy; how my astrophotography rig worked, some cool asterisms like the Teapot in Sagittarius, some NASA missions like Kepler and Hubble and what they have given us; all kinds of stuff. They were really interested, and we had a great time. I had brought along my handheld binoculars, which they passed around to scan through the Milky Way and see the Galilean moons of Jupiter. I gave them my contact info to chat more. It was a great time!</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The second rig</h2><div>Since everything was running smoothly on the main rig, I eventually turned my attention to the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer, ZWO ASI294MC Pro, and Nikon camera lens rig. I have been having some trouble with the red dot finder for this rig since the battery doesn't sit well inside its housing, so I had to point it blindly at the intended target: the Cygnus Loop, or Veil Nebula. I've been trying for quite a while to get the whole thing in one shot to come out well, but don't really have a good enough camera lens for it. But I figured I'd give it a try with this rig. The Veil was difficult to see in a single frame, and with the wide field of view I couldn't really tell where I was pointing, so I needed the help of technology to get me on target. The Star Adventurer tracks but doesn't have go-to, so I kind of had to do the centering process by hand: I took a 10s image, uploaded it to astrometry.net (I couldn't figure out how to use PlateSolve2 separately from inside a sequence in Sequence Generator Pro) (I tethered my laptop to my phone's 5G connection), waited a few minutes for it to plate solve, look at the superimposed image on a sky map on the Worldwide Telescope website, and then guesstimate re-positioning the camera and take another image. I iterated on this process for a while, but just couldn't quite land on it. </div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">End of the first night</h2><div>While all the rest of this was happening, I found some time at around 1 AM to finally set up my tent. I didn't bring my canopy on this short of a trip, so I set up on the west side of the main observatory building so that I could have shade from the morning sun and be able to sleep in for a while. I wound up chatting with people all night and didn't go to bed until dawn was creeping in at 4 AM! It was somewhere in the mid to upper 50s in temperature, so I slept pretty well inside my down sleeping bag on my air mattress. I have a <a href="https://www.coleman.com/all-tents/4-person-tents/4-person-dark-room-sundome-tent/col_2000032253_pr/COL_2000032253">Coleman dark tent</a> that helps block a lot of sunlight and heat, so I was able to sleep in until 10 AM, thanks also to my sleeping mask and earplugs.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8mTVgMRkG0DD4rwLY233wXuq7b-MdSYxB_2ZUtH3TqbCyzM26j_m4xd-TrpXGMovNNYLoaY8oOoCX2bt0-0EBS4haKaPj6lCRLMEVkx9r-_osyUl5GaPRZ9Rlktjzn_wduATS3KjcGRY/s4032/2020-06-21+11.14.24-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" height="351" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8mTVgMRkG0DD4rwLY233wXuq7b-MdSYxB_2ZUtH3TqbCyzM26j_m4xd-TrpXGMovNNYLoaY8oOoCX2bt0-0EBS4haKaPj6lCRLMEVkx9r-_osyUl5GaPRZ9Rlktjzn_wduATS3KjcGRY/w625-h351/2020-06-21+11.14.24-1.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Night #2</h2><div>Most of the folks went home, but a couple stuck around for a second night. Being a student is a great time to do astronomy because I don't have to be at work or work specific hours, so getting home whenever on Monday was no big deal. </div><div><br /></div><div>I spent the day walking the airstrip, running daytime timelapses, reading <a href="https://szattwell.com/?fbclid=IwAR0u1_QdqzrBipzaYsWTNUB77FITtpTMtveukCIOmyw_SjXMIv-eG4o0ITY">my friend Sabrina's upcoming book</a>, and moving my chair from shady spot to shady spot as the day wore on. The forecast promised another clear night, with even fewer clouds than we had the night before. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">As dinnertime approached, I pulled out my camp stove and grilled some of the bratwurst I had brought along, which was an excellent life choice. I set up the grill in the shade of one of the trailers there, which worked out great. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUa8A5rNIt_cc0PZ6QP4RHt4RgevGaEJ_zcF6UD1HS6Zjx5sGI7Kn4Xn1Ycsa908ooxPqBjqE93xX2G6Zhj170FV_A6q3ZGdia5wDVx3y0WhLr7JkV3O488se-9V3KTuN5OaAGRAdlVCA/s4032/2020-06-21+17.39.44.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" height="351" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUa8A5rNIt_cc0PZ6QP4RHt4RgevGaEJ_zcF6UD1HS6Zjx5sGI7Kn4Xn1Ycsa908ooxPqBjqE93xX2G6Zhj170FV_A6q3ZGdia5wDVx3y0WhLr7JkV3O488se-9V3KTuN5OaAGRAdlVCA/w625-h351/2020-06-21+17.39.44.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Summertime is great and all, but the long days and short nights make it hard to be patient for darkness! But darkness finally did fall, and my main scope again started up without issue. I had some time to squeeze in some hydrogen-alpha <i>and</i> oxygen-III images as well as the LRGB I was doing since everything ran so smoothly. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Over on the Star Adventurer, I had spent some time during the day figuring out what to do about my mostly-broken red dot finder, and wound up jury-rigging a finder that attaches to my DSLR's camera shoe into the Synta-type dovetail bracket on top of the ZWO clamp, which was close enough to at least give me some indication of where it was pointing. Between the finder and plate-solving in astrometry.net again, I <i>finally</i> landed the camera on the Veil Nebula and started acquiring images. I had roughly polar aligned the Star Adventurer using the polar scope, but since I had the ZWO on it this time rather than my DSLR, I was finally able to use SharpCap to fine-tune the polar alignment. Even with that though, it's kind of a wobbly mount, so I was only able to get reliable exposures at 60s exposure time at 200mm of focal length. Oh well -- I was able to get a couple hundred of them though, which should help in getting the target to come out in processing.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">After chatting some more with the remaining people, I got myself to bed at 1 AM this time so I could get home in enough time on Monday to hopefully get a little work done. I let the scopes continue to run the rest of the night.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Results</h2><div>After making it home before noon on Monday morning, my brain was too fizzled to work on school things, so I processed the Pelican Nebula data instead! The data looked really good, so I tried a couple different things for processing. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP6wWHAhqqO8cO94d50rrMGggbvOTcMrcZ1CK7kuvgk4SkrqFaAcZPl3RJAv312lxLsfuew9KKbZBQjGJTeAiagB9RNWfb0Y17vpzSySXJCIQOHhGZQSxXPJsjbA_Ne4VjjiB5sxVMX0Q/s4538/pelican_1_1_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3464" data-original-width="4538" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP6wWHAhqqO8cO94d50rrMGggbvOTcMrcZ1CK7kuvgk4SkrqFaAcZPl3RJAv312lxLsfuew9KKbZBQjGJTeAiagB9RNWfb0Y17vpzSySXJCIQOHhGZQSxXPJsjbA_Ne4VjjiB5sxVMX0Q/w625-h476/pelican_1_1_3+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Details:</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Date: 20, 21 June 2020</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Location: Blue Canyon Nyack Airport, CA (Sacremento Valley AS dark site)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Object: IC 5070 Pelican Nebula </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Attempt: 3</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106N</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Accessories: ZWO 7-position 2-inch filter wheel, RoboFocus, Astronomik CLS-CCD 2-inch filter, </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Astronomik RGB Type 2c 2-inch filters, Chroma 3nm Ha & OIII 50mm filters</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Mount: Paramount MyT</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Guide scope: Orion 50mm mini-guider</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Guide camera: QHY5</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Subframes: L: 26x300s</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> R: 17x180s</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> G: 13x180s</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> B: 11x180s</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Ha: 5x600s</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> OIII: 5x600s</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Total: 5h53m</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Gain/ISO: 139</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Acquisition method: Sequence Generator Pro</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Stacking program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Post-Processing program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Darks: 100 each</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Biases: 0</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Flats: 0</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Temperature: -20C</div></i></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The narrowband data didn't have a whole lot of subframes, and the luminance channel didn't have quite enough subframes to do really good deconvolution, but overall it came out all right! I enhanced the red and luminance channels with the Ha, and enhanced the green and blue channels with the OIII. (Details on how to do this can be found on the <a href="https://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-combining-lrgb-with-narrowband.html">Light Vortex</a> tutorial website). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">For fun, I processed just the Ha data as well, and I removed the stars using the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/starnet/files/PixInsight_module/">Starnet++ plugin</a>. (The readme file includes installation instructions. You can also <a href="https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/">run it outside of PixInsight</a>). It's quite a dramatic image.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEvq2ZXbfi8JYZp5ZGt7avfSPY17BuvUNZvhqrW6ydPFA1HyYUv8gSKOIdE9Av3LI-SZkpIEzRKxg-JQ2GM7s5hymfhe0tnIcx7OkIFxgTbdaNxguEJXargU2ivR3thSCWcUY0x0POXFQ/s4538/pelican_1_1-Ha_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3464" data-original-width="4538" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEvq2ZXbfi8JYZp5ZGt7avfSPY17BuvUNZvhqrW6ydPFA1HyYUv8gSKOIdE9Av3LI-SZkpIEzRKxg-JQ2GM7s5hymfhe0tnIcx7OkIFxgTbdaNxguEJXargU2ivR3thSCWcUY0x0POXFQ/w625-h476/pelican_1_1-Ha_1+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I <i>love</i> the monochrome Ha starless image. It's so cool! It looks familiar yet alien at the same time.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Over on the Star Adventurer, the Veil Nebula came out okay. It's probably the best of the times I've attempted it with a camera lens, largely because the ZWO ASI294MC Pro is a lot more sensitive to red (and more sensitive in general) than my DSLR.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaq7Q00QwNQa-Por8VI4gtF0ub6OeuX7dvpwiBTXyCUVPU69TesWOokPYuWt3-SlzbBp5muyxRVlnpNPhPkLm3Sr2lBHr2bSS8E6awENhbPg_ZogkklLWdKdvmPrjdzNp5hh9PtG-fQRU/s3498/veil_2_1_2+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2528" data-original-width="3498" height="451" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaq7Q00QwNQa-Por8VI4gtF0ub6OeuX7dvpwiBTXyCUVPU69TesWOokPYuWt3-SlzbBp5muyxRVlnpNPhPkLm3Sr2lBHr2bSS8E6awENhbPg_ZogkklLWdKdvmPrjdzNp5hh9PtG-fQRU/w625-h451/veil_2_1_2+%2528wm%2529+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Date: 21 June 2020</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Location: Blue Canyon Nyack Airport, CA</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Object: Veil Nebula</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Attempt: 2</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Telescope: Nikon 50-200mm lens @ 200mm, f-something</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Accessories: Orion SkyGlow filter</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Mount: Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Guide scope: N/A</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Guide camera: N/A</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Subframes: 88x60s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> 2x120s</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Total: 1h32m</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Gain/ISO: 120</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Acquisition method: Sequence Generator Pro</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Stacking program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Post-Processing program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Darks: 100</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Biases: 0</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Flats: 0</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>Temperature: -20C</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I didn't get great detail on the nebulae if you were to look up close, but I did pick up a fair bit of the Pickering region, which was exciting! Unfortunately, this lens is not really ideal for astrophotography, so my stars are enormous and dominate the image. Later this year, I'll be purchasing the Samyang or Rokinon 135mm f/2, most likely. <a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2019/07/197-tuesday-july-9-2019-shooting-with.html">I got to use one on my trip to Chile</a> last year and it was amazing!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The reason I say "f-something" for the focal ratio is because I don't actually know what it is. My Nikon 50-200mm lens has electronically-controlled aperture than than manually-controlled, so in order to open the aperture, I cut a toothpick into small pieces and inserted them in the groove where the aperture lever is to keep it open. I initially tested it fully wide open, but there was some pretty significant field curvature, so I took out one of the toothpicks so now it's only half-open. Also, I've taped down the focuser and the zoom so that they don't move with some gaffer's tape. It was still in focus both when I got out to the campsite and when I got back!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgob8V5MezkjVa5l4vCU2COq9zLeMvkczCmn-8EuMtTMUEXQs8z_nkuxTpdOObILHrDh4EH9JjIhrVIUrF-yPl-Ts_BiI1TzaLWgyQegVyxf4B6shrAYNKDYxwqzpyt9k4IOuiHaDLUVeU/s4032/2020-06-08+20.37.27+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="2268" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgob8V5MezkjVa5l4vCU2COq9zLeMvkczCmn-8EuMtTMUEXQs8z_nkuxTpdOObILHrDh4EH9JjIhrVIUrF-yPl-Ts_BiI1TzaLWgyQegVyxf4B6shrAYNKDYxwqzpyt9k4IOuiHaDLUVeU/w281-h500/2020-06-08+20.37.27+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="281" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Imaged here with both toothpicks in, fully opening the aperture.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>They're the same height as the lever, so they don't interfere with attaching the camera to the lens bayonet adapter I have on my image train for the ZWO camera.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Conclusion</h2><div style="text-align: left;">It was a really, really great weekend! I was glad to get out of the house for a bit during all this lockdown, we had really nice weather, and I got some great astro images. My gear worked really well, and I met some great people. Hopefully I'll be able to go up a couple more times this summer. The itch to finally get a camper-trailer is getting at me again, if I can find room in my budget, especially since I towed a trailer when I moved out here last summer and partly got over the fear of towing. We shall see...</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I'm really glad I got to do this! Can't wait for more!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2020/07/374-375-saturday-sunday-july-18-19-2020.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #379 & #380 - Saturday & Sunday, July 18-19, 2020 - Family camping, auto-guiding the Star Adventurer, and my new trailer!!</span></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><font><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/340-monday-may-25-2020-for-science.html">Previous post: #346 - Monday, May 25, 2020 - For Science!!</a></font><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><font size="6">Table of Contents</font></a><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-90061018269728837252020-05-26T12:35:00.004-07:002020-10-07T20:58:24.864-07:00#346 - Monday, May 25, 2020 - For Science!!If you know me at all, you know I like science. And you also know that the previous sentence was an understatement! <div><br /></div><div>For quite a while, I've meant to learn how to take scientific data, such as variable star observations, exoplanet transits, etc. I got connected to the AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers) by way of a friend of mine from my last astronomy club, Phil, who put me in touch with the Director of the AAVSO, Stella Kafka, because she's a female astrophysics PhD who he thought I might like to talk to for mentorship. I resolved after our Skype call to look at adding observation runs to the beginning or end of my imaging runs, but it never happened, for one reason or another.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Idea</h2><div><br /></div><div>Since I currently have two rigs up in the backyard, but only one good monochrome camera that I quickly grew tired of swapping back and forth between the two platforms, I decided I ought to put the second rig to good use as a scientific data-taking rig! Believe it or not, the gear requirements for taking useful observations for variable stars and exoplanets is <i>less</i> than for deep-sky astrophotography. The exposures are generally shorter, your stars don't necessarily need to be round nor in focus (actually it can be helpful for them to be slightly <i>de-</i>focused, so as so spread the light across multiple pixels and get a more accurate reading), your camera doesn't have to be as good, and your tracking doesn't have to be as good. As an example, on last night's The Astro Imaging Channel's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBO2N1QrvEo">presentation about amateur observing of exoplanets</a>, NASA's Rob Zellem mentioned that he had a student who used a 6-inch reflector on a mount with such bad tracking that the star drifted 300 pixels over the course of the dataset! </div><div><br /></div><div>The second rig I have out in the backyard, aside from the Paramount MyT and Celestron C8 that is my pretty-picture imaging rig, is my Celestron AVX with a Vixen 8-inch f/4 Newtonian that a very generous member of my last astronomy club gave me. I was going to use it for imaging, but I haven't yet gotten a configuration of coma corrector and the spacing between that and my camera sorted out to have the coma reduced enough to properly take pretty pictures with it. So it's just been hangin' out in my backyard collecting pollen and spider webs underneath its Telegizmos 365 cover.</div><div><br /></div><div>The thought occurred to me to make it a science rig a little while ago, but I couldn't decide what to do about a camera. I definitely needed a monochrome camera. On the upside, I still have my Starlight Xpress electronic filter wheel after swapping it out for the ZWO version that has more filter slots for the 2-inch size. I got a carousel for it that holds 1.25" filters a while back, and I recently popped in my 1.25" Astronomik RGB filters and my Schuler BVRI photometric filters that another generous member of my last astro club gave me (I don't have the U filter, but it appears to be less important than the others) into it. </div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">I found a camera!</h2><div><br /></div><div>So I went a-hunting through my spare gear boxes -- all the stuff that I've acquired, usually by someone giving it to me, that I haven't put to use yet, or at least, am currently not using. I figured there was a camera in there I had forgotten about. And lo, there was such a camera -- an Orion Deep Space Monochrome Imager II. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg78jpyGIkgVU0_8q-ARcrtM4iIH2AucHeOgeeAt3MIGPcbFynDSXHtHDvQeqSoQt0MwQwA40XGnaf8YvywaiFgPjd9RDZAmf2VmqXFD-Nci3FE-NiZ2rBdRtOaqCGF-M_YqIKSZZGAK1s/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="514" data-original-width="668" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg78jpyGIkgVU0_8q-ARcrtM4iIH2AucHeOgeeAt3MIGPcbFynDSXHtHDvQeqSoQt0MwQwA40XGnaf8YvywaiFgPjd9RDZAmf2VmqXFD-Nci3FE-NiZ2rBdRtOaqCGF-M_YqIKSZZGAK1s/s320/orion-ssdsmi-ii.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Internet image because I forgot to take my own</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>It's an old camera -- old enough that its manual references the fact that you have to use USB 2.0 instead of 1.1, says you need Windows 2000, XP, or Vista, and also actually says that a mouse is a requirement -- but to my delight, it has some key features for an astro camera, particularly one for doing scientific data-taking. </div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It's a CCD chip rather than CMOS. While CMOS is arguably more sensitive (at least, at the consumer level), CCD has a more linear performance, which is ideal for science.</li><li>It has big juicy pixels -- 8.6 microns! Compared to my pretty-picture-taking CMOS camera, which has 3.8-micron pixels. This might sound weird to the casual reader, since bigger pixels mean less resolution, right? True -- the resolution is 2.2 arcsec/px on my Newtonian, which isn't ideal (something closer to 1 is better in most cases). But! Bigger pixels means more light-collecting area, and thus much higher sensitivity. This means I can get more light in a shorter amount of time (particularly helpful considering how not-great the tracking is on my AVX). </li><li>It's a <i>cooled camera!</i> This one was a shocker. I expected it to have larger pixels and to be CCD, but when I looked up its specs, I learned that it has a TEC (thermo-electric cooler) that can go down to 20 degrees C below ambient. Woo hoo! This is great news because it means I can have much less noisy images. Hopefully. I'll still have plenty of noise to deal with -- it has a ridiculously high read noise of 24 electrons/ADU, according to s<a href="https://astropetros.eu/?p=355">ome guy who made the measurements and posted about it</a> -- but it at least reduces one noise source.</li><li>It has a 16-bit ADC. At least, I think it does, according to some posts I saw about it online. Now, a lot of lower- and mid-level astro cameras have 12-bit or 14-bit ADCs (analog-to-digital converters -- basically, how many brightness levels you can encode into the saved image), which gets saved as a 16-bit number, but is really only converted to 12- or 14-bit. Having a true 16-bit ADC is normally reserved for the higher-end cameras. The higher the bit depth, the more brightness levels your software can discern between, which makes for a higher-contrast image, or better science data.</li><li>It has a small chip. 1/2" diagonal, 752x582 pixels. Ordinarily this would be less than helpful, but since my particular problem with the Newtonian regards coma, which stretches out stars close to the edges of the field-of-view, this actually works in my favor by only imaging the "nice" center region of the FOV, which should have good-looking stars. Also, the frames should download faster. <i>If Sequence Generator Pro downloaded frames in a reasonable amount of time</i>, which it doesn't! Even on my fast CMOS cameras, which can run 10 fps in SharpCap full-frame (or at least 2 when I'm in 16-bit mode), it takes like 5s to download the frame. Hmph. Anyway...</li></ul><div>One weird thing about this camera is that the TEC runs on a 3V DC power source. 3V?? It came with a battery back that takes two D-cell batteries. I have no idea how long those will run it for, but the manual says "it's a good idea to bring a spare set with you." Also, I have no clue whether or not the TEC is running, since you can't turn it on/off, set the temperature, etc. You just plug it in, and it cools to whatever 20C below ambient happens to be. I don't want to be buying D-cell batteries all the time, so I've got an adjustable AC power converter coming in the mail from Amazon.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">But does the camera work?</h2><div>One pitfall of older gear is that getting a given device to work on newer computer systems is dicey, as is finding drivers for it. Fortunately, <a href="https://www.telescope.com/Orion-StarShoot-Deep-Space-Monochrome-Imaging-Camera-III/p/99568.uts">the Orion website</a> still had both the camera and ASCOM drivers. The ASCOM driver installed no problem, but the camera driver file just unzipped some system files and no executables or anything that looked helpful.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIGg1oXXj21GX5kUYPm7sPaB_5U128VRTdBJsouwegrV1AbNbimQNjJxE8t-A_ctkRwTMWJkYDXBA6Jv0dps-Ja3dz5IuaKbQVOd9l07RHl2oyByLB11N-P4ArpXLQugH_ejoIBVUSXkQ/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="90" data-original-width="688" height="72" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIGg1oXXj21GX5kUYPm7sPaB_5U128VRTdBJsouwegrV1AbNbimQNjJxE8t-A_ctkRwTMWJkYDXBA6Jv0dps-Ja3dz5IuaKbQVOd9l07RHl2oyByLB11N-P4ArpXLQugH_ejoIBVUSXkQ/w549-h72/driver+files.jpg" width="549" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>So I tried opening the camera in SharpCap just with the ASCOM driver (and it did show up there), but it said it couldn't connect. I tried a couple other programs, but they all said the same thing. So I hit up the internet and found out that you have to install the driver in a bit of a roundabout way: if you go to Device Manager (this is Windows 10 by the way), it'll show up in the Unknown Devices list. Click Update Driver, and choose the "browse local files" option. Then go to the folder where these driver files are located. The wizard installed the driver from those files, and bingo, it worked! I was able to open the camera in SharpCap, and it did show changes in light level when I took the cap on and off. Success! </div><div><br /></div></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Connecting things together</h2><div>The next step was to get it installed on the telescope. I currently had an M42-M48 converter ring on the focuser so I could connect the coma corrector, but I needed to take it off since my filter wheel has an M42 connector (M42 is the same as T2 or T-thread). Unfortunately, it was pretty well stuck on there, and after many attempts, I was unable to remove it. So I grabbed one of the spacers that came with my ZWO camera, a 16.5mm guy, which has M48 female on one side and M42 male on the other. It effectively works as a converter. I got it all put together, but the telescope is unfortunately too close to the fence to be able to see any of the things in the distance I could use to test focus. So I had to wait for nightfall.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfTDZFPrbkI5IzoL_dQi_ZaHXthpqh-o2cucfTFFQArQtMWkk4lr-3Mbu-xZUUPndg-zuo2AAK1xYA4b-YsgcQZBvwDmxsc4z1WJA0TRJ70w6SXTLVE1prfopJdNL-g-snn23ZcfaMva8/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2268" data-original-width="4032" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfTDZFPrbkI5IzoL_dQi_ZaHXthpqh-o2cucfTFFQArQtMWkk4lr-3Mbu-xZUUPndg-zuo2AAK1xYA4b-YsgcQZBvwDmxsc4z1WJA0TRJ70w6SXTLVE1prfopJdNL-g-snn23ZcfaMva8/w407-h229/2020-05-26+07.53.18+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="407" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwjeUWIIff-TIe9Oa_JQG18xT0s-P-NIYzblOV8zOBLPc_iTgcqQ7tvGyDG1IPLA4JyEJ25-Y69-dz7XZmChXh2GUj5DBqUO0NPY_oKDyl09NtugK6oOea15wxElo02SVgYLsFn1iwaxQ/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="2268" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwjeUWIIff-TIe9Oa_JQG18xT0s-P-NIYzblOV8zOBLPc_iTgcqQ7tvGyDG1IPLA4JyEJ25-Y69-dz7XZmChXh2GUj5DBqUO0NPY_oKDyl09NtugK6oOea15wxElo02SVgYLsFn1iwaxQ/w224-h398/2020-05-25+19.31.44+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="224" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Once it was dark, I went outside into the blessedly cool night air -- my house had warmed up considerably in the sun to 85 degrees! I had the windows open and fans running, but it took quite a while to cool down. After getting my main rig hooked up and ready to go, I slewed the scope to Arcturus for focusing. Luckily for me, the giant de-focused star appeared in the camera's tiny field-of-view, so I was able to center it before focusing. Also luckily for me, it did come into focus! Not a whole lot of backfocus on this scope. I think if I'm going to put a motorized focuser on it in the future, I'm going to have to replace the whole focuser. We shall see. I still need to measure how parfocal my photometric filters are.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">But, mount issues abound</h2><div>If you've been following my blog, then you probably know that Celestron mounts have brought me little but woe. While I did have this AVX mount working quite nicely last fall, it has again turned against me with a horrifically high amount of declination backlash. Two months ago or so, I popped open the casing to see if I needed to adjust the gears again, but the gear meshing and tightness looked fine. So I don't know what's causing the backlash now. I didn't re-balance it after putting this gear on because I didn't want to have to re-do the alignment before I got it focused, so I'll do that in the morning.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwr8z_lToOlIG4bZyK9F23GAjrSVkGwMZFNO4GaINYNtd7lcQevNgxDBc_XbQRzA8f9rbFSSEivDNfe-NiJfiICQsUJqrhiBXrUoWA1n_4fHmK2I6Wa5j1vQgzqOj-B06WBVE4UnaNnPs/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1221" data-original-width="1920" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwr8z_lToOlIG4bZyK9F23GAjrSVkGwMZFNO4GaINYNtd7lcQevNgxDBc_XbQRzA8f9rbFSSEivDNfe-NiJfiICQsUJqrhiBXrUoWA1n_4fHmK2I6Wa5j1vQgzqOj-B06WBVE4UnaNnPs/w419-h267/2020-05-25.png" width="419" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>First light!</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I tried re-calibrating the autoguider, since it was really bad last time I tried, but it was just as bad this time.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheu0lCKU9YENVBdZqdFctfJzdLjZbguHDDsytOGtDmE9fJv7qtaRvKalt2rz5JKOCzGgRQ_mfbtAXnU2VsQmsoueip2DxHUSR9iC2ooba3sLQ1jO4dZJbwYuwcugcU3XWmyytF8VfPywg/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="542" data-original-width="960" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheu0lCKU9YENVBdZqdFctfJzdLjZbguHDDsytOGtDmE9fJv7qtaRvKalt2rz5JKOCzGgRQ_mfbtAXnU2VsQmsoueip2DxHUSR9iC2ooba3sLQ1jO4dZJbwYuwcugcU3XWmyytF8VfPywg/w387-h219/2020-05-25+%25281%2529.png" width="387" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>As you can probably guess from that super-weird-looking calibration, guiding was nuts-crazy. So was tracking -- plate solving to get the first target of the night centered just was not working. Partly because sometimes the stars were streaked, although it still seemed to be finding those okay and not grabbing noise pixels. But it still couldn't plate solve, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it has to do with the other weird aspect of this camera -- the <i>pixels aren't square.</i> They're slightly rectangular! They're actually 8.6 x 8.3 microns. SGP only has one dimension for pixel size in the plate solve settings that it feeds to the plate solve software (I'm using Planewave's PlateSolve2 software, which is free by the way!)</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Target list</h2><div>Earlier in the day, I worked on a target list. The AAVSO has a <a href="https://filtergraph.com/aavso">target-selection tool</a> that you can sort in a number of ways, including by how high-priority the target is. So I scrolled through to find targets scattered throughout the night that I estimated had magnitudes within reach of my gear and were within the field-of-view I have between my house, my plum and lemon trees, and my neighbor's garage. I put the targets and their info into a spreadsheet so I could keep track, since they each had different requirements. For some stars, the primary researchers wanted specific channels, like just B or V. For others, they want as much of a full set of photometry as you can take. Some are known to be long-period variables and only need observations every week or month. Some are changing fast and needed observations every minute for a couple hours throughout the night. Some are currently super-dim, but are expected to erupt soon, so they only want your observations if the star gets above a specific magnitude. So many different things! And that's just variable stars -- I'd like to do exoplanet light curves as well here soon. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7flTDOxq2qEyUc9dUUK2fBC_pOX5UNq552PYRcZ34Na8Ddj6A2jfbGL2c5vXgfFim7i42reUxt4mmH97ac4MnjcFcTnogyWqw8gxznQ1vhBYU2q-fOAsQ8yBnwRyMNOqPuyIOr1CYHPo/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="193" data-original-width="943" height="104" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7flTDOxq2qEyUc9dUUK2fBC_pOX5UNq552PYRcZ34Na8Ddj6A2jfbGL2c5vXgfFim7i42reUxt4mmH97ac4MnjcFcTnogyWqw8gxznQ1vhBYU2q-fOAsQ8yBnwRyMNOqPuyIOr1CYHPo/w504-h104/variable+star+list.jpg" width="504" /></a></div><div><br /></div>You might recognize the name of one of those stars -- KIC 846-bunch-of-numbers. It's the famous Tabby's Star! Named for the Louisiana State University professor who discovered its odd behavior, this is the one that was showing dramatic dimming and brightening cycles that spurred the discussion of the chance that an alien civilization was constructing a Dyson sphere. The real explanation is probably less fantastical, but is still being investigated. </div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Result</h2><div>As you might guess, with the mount issues, the sequence did not collect any data last night. In fact, when I checked in the morning, it had apparently tracked past the meridian enough for the loose dec axis to do the thing where it falls a bit due to gravity, which causes the motors to go crazy. It wound up on the wrong side of the mount and pointing at the ground. Luckily, no harm was done, although I'm going to have to re-align it tonight. I also re-balanced it, which might help?</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">And the primary rig?</h2><div>My main imaging rig, the Paramount MyT with my Celestron C8 and ZWO mono camera with my other filter wheel and my fancy PrimaLuce Lab Esatto focuser, ran flawlessly. I tweaked the aggressiveness values a bit more in PHD down to 40 in RA and 70 in Dec, which seemed to help even more with the problem of huge fluctuations for M51 and M13. The M51 guide graph still showed huge spikes in dec as high as 4 arcseconds, but the images did not suffer as much weirdness. I was able to keep the majority of the images. *sniffles* So beautiful!!</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/06/359-360-saturday-sunday-20-21-june-2020.html"><font>Next post: #365 & #366 - Saturday-Sunday, 20-21 June 2020 - Astro-Camping Weekend!!</font></a><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><font size="6"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/338-saturday-may-23-2020-more-success.html">Previous post: #344 - Saturday, May 23, 2020 - More Success! And some useful diagnostic tools</a><br /></font></div><div><font size="6"><br /></font></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><font size="6">Table of Contents</font></a><br /></div>AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-29261969346669026782020-05-24T12:12:00.004-07:002020-10-07T20:13:52.857-07:00#344 - Saturday, May 23, 2020 - More Success! And some useful diagnostic tools<span>After <a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/328-wednesday-may-6-2020-its-workinggggg.html">finally getting all of my gear working</a>, I had several nights that were mostly clear, but had lots of passing thin, high clouds that kept wrecking things and causing my sequence to abort midway through the night. So data has been coming in very slowly. However, the last couple of nights have been crystal-clear!</span><br />
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<span>Also, side-note: Google has <i>finally</i> updated the user interface for Blogger! Thank goodness. It really looked like it was still stuck in 2002. They took away the option to re-size images, so sorry they're kind of small.</span><br />
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<h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Context Camera</span></h2>
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<span>When using a long-focal-length telescope, it can be hard to tell when there are clouds or tree branches in your frames. Many people use their guide camera to see this, but since I'm using an off-axis guider, it's pretty much impossible to see those things. So two weeks ago, I finally implemented a plan I've had for a little while.</span></div>
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<span>I scrounged through my box of extra gear I haven't put to good use yet -- lots of old cameras, lenses, and other stuff people have given me. (I will find a use for them <i>all!</i>). One of my friends from when I was living in the Midwest, Will, gave me a color Meade DSI when I bought his Orion ST-80 off him to use as a guide scope on my old setup. It's not a very good camera by today's standards, but I don't need a good camera for this. I also grabbed my shortest focal length CCTV lens that my friend John gave me, a little 25mm guy. A while back, I bought a T-thread to C-mount converter so I could attach these kinds of lenses to my astro cameras, so I grabbed it too from my tool box, and assembled everything together. After installing the Meade Autostar Envisage software to run the thing (Meade cameras don't do ASCOM :( ) and seeing what kind of spacing I needed to bring distant things into focus, I figured out that I didn't need any spacers at all -- the CCTV lens was designed to sit right in front of the sensor, I guess. Woot! </span></div>
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<span>The next task was to figure out how to rig it up on my telescope. Currently, I have my Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain on my new Paramount MyT mount. I have a short Vixen-sized dovetail bolted to the telescope tube still from back when I was running my DSLR piggyback on it a while ago, so I grabbed one of the Vixen-sized clamps I have. Unfortunately, neither the camera nor the lens has a tripod attachment or any other useful way of attaching it to something tripod-esque. So I did what any good engineer does -- I used some Velcro to strap it to the clamp! It sags a big under gravity, but I don't need it to be perfectly co-boresighted with the telescope, just pointing in the same general direction. It won't fall off the way I've got it rigged up, and that's the main thing I care about.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhicLNgrRYviBOaWpJfGAeFVojogY2Mxe-083lMVclNL9AwKBBbOTXEnPjbai4o1tRx2d47sp_jyn5PB2URKwj1v-mjLUo92jqLfKNOM0Ei1wWKWgJfAYKEv4lYg0ZZ3A5bmS107DEZ2R4/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="389" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhicLNgrRYviBOaWpJfGAeFVojogY2Mxe-083lMVclNL9AwKBBbOTXEnPjbai4o1tRx2d47sp_jyn5PB2URKwj1v-mjLUo92jqLfKNOM0Ei1wWKWgJfAYKEv4lYg0ZZ3A5bmS107DEZ2R4/w292-h389/2020-05-09+16.43.14+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="292" /></span></a></div>
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<span>I figured out on the second night using it that I could use the Meade software to take a timelapse, so I set it to save an image every 30s throughout the course of the night. This would let me go through and see why the sequence aborted, and also throw out frames where thin clouds were rolling through (this can be hard to tell in the subframes). </span></div>
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<span>It's really been paying off -- now I can see if I got too close to a tree, or if the reason I can't get a guide star is because of clouds or something else. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">New Problems, New Solutions</span></h2>
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<span>When more parts of your system are working, smaller issues tend to present themselves where they were buried under other issues before. Some of my targets have had no issues, such as galaxy M88 at the beginning of the night and the Ring Nebula (M57) at the end of the night, but the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) and some of the Hercules Cluster (globular cluster M13) have been having some strange issues. In many of the frames, the stars appear to form a diamond pattern.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJUXOhG2_gQz2pzGYTew6Hoe7CG1uEICw2M6__ebGAq1xvcOt7lymvH6wECR-KV-0Gv-ZkdZHZqxnFhIMZ-3PtlR-7tybArcRxizC5AYw7mUiBSiYRDgT_JEnz2hK3VY5KWbTxaWnV2S4/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span><img border="0" data-original-height="571" data-original-width="758" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJUXOhG2_gQz2pzGYTew6Hoe7CG1uEICw2M6__ebGAq1xvcOt7lymvH6wECR-KV-0Gv-ZkdZHZqxnFhIMZ-3PtlR-7tybArcRxizC5AYw7mUiBSiYRDgT_JEnz2hK3VY5KWbTxaWnV2S4/w410-h309/05.24%252C+M51%252C+diamond+pattern+stars.jpg" width="410" /></span></a></div>
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<span>At first, I thought this was a result of diffraction around a tree branch. But since I have added the context camera, I could go to the timestamp of when those weird subframes were taken and check and see what was going on. No tree branches in sight. So I wondered what the guide graphs looked like, and wished there was a way to see the whole night's guide graph.</span></div>
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<span>I was poking around through the PHD2 software settings and decided to see what all the log file had in it that might be useful. Well, as it turns out, every data point from the whole night is contained in it! Every correction, guide star SNR, RMS error, etc. So I decided I'd write up some code to plot the points so I could look at the whole night.</span></div>
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<span>Well, before I was about to start writing the code, I did a Google search to see if anyone else had already done it. I should have known -- of course other people have done it. There's a nicely-packaged executable that shows you everything from the file -- it can be found <a href="http://adgsoftware.com/phd2utils/">here</a>. It will show you the calibration run as well, the data plotted in frequency-space so you can look at drive harmonics, the guide graph shows when the guide star was lost, the star's SNR, and a bunch of other useful statistics. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Thanks Andy Galasso! </span></div>
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<span>So I went to the portion of the night where I was imaging M51. And the source of the diamond pattern was very obvious!</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUQAXVo809oJihgpwtIkQMqVSL4TfIAH-_h9P9qOILv_ihTZYYSOILQuyr3yoN9umqfo9cFE2aE3QukxwhDuFv4fpZXgnpp9RhYgAKqUOJSoQ2uqOdxHALQLmpw8FaocssFD5b0Ztxw28/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span><img border="0" data-original-height="1038" data-original-width="1915" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUQAXVo809oJihgpwtIkQMqVSL4TfIAH-_h9P9qOILv_ihTZYYSOILQuyr3yoN9umqfo9cFE2aE3QukxwhDuFv4fpZXgnpp9RhYgAKqUOJSoQ2uqOdxHALQLmpw8FaocssFD5b0Ztxw28/w453-h245/m88+guiding.jpg" width="453" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span><i>M88 guide graph -- looks good</i></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4aAXmuBC8QNqm_f5fFSHrVIvKYQuCUS3OA7JinEQyHW4Htbc9Pp937MeY8WW5MOXllBpPpooAJ4dWf1VLTZnWkKredDN2TQPt1uPfijBP1jgxuGhD2XzaS1J-aK-r59_oB6ETyXrbMNM/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span><img border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="1919" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4aAXmuBC8QNqm_f5fFSHrVIvKYQuCUS3OA7JinEQyHW4Htbc9Pp937MeY8WW5MOXllBpPpooAJ4dWf1VLTZnWkKredDN2TQPt1uPfijBP1jgxuGhD2XzaS1J-aK-r59_oB6ETyXrbMNM/w496-h268/m51+guide+graph.jpg" width="496" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span><i>M51 guide graph -- what the heck???</i></span></td></tr>
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<span>So clearly there is something weird going on with my mount in that part of the sky. </span></div>
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<span>My other two targets for the night -- M13 and M57 -- had some troubles too though.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0cND1ZEgEvw25UkYSyQ5gZzpBq0y0jL55O2KFHlT3wuSylRckyt0B5oc2gIN4n_2j__9dZ2tD-E5owE0NLXgr61yAyRVMYR96hZhdOw6oKyYlr1ppFp58Nj4h6rq65vgqJmou-7YkgCM/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span><img border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="1917" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0cND1ZEgEvw25UkYSyQ5gZzpBq0y0jL55O2KFHlT3wuSylRckyt0B5oc2gIN4n_2j__9dZ2tD-E5owE0NLXgr61yAyRVMYR96hZhdOw6oKyYlr1ppFp58Nj4h6rq65vgqJmou-7YkgCM/w500-h272/m13+guide+graph.jpg" width="500" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span><i>M13 guide graph</i></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHPmiT1U7fIvinjN76SJMTg7tQLLeaqPst9zU0OhIcBFjtnmJA9z-XPLh4wzEArUN8aCwKLylC8330dIcNctQx5isTEV7EwEpyUebGOAMIgm3BlC8ropdughMSLncR5mQYxONdFVhuT9Q/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span><img border="0" data-original-height="1038" data-original-width="1919" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHPmiT1U7fIvinjN76SJMTg7tQLLeaqPst9zU0OhIcBFjtnmJA9z-XPLh4wzEArUN8aCwKLylC8330dIcNctQx5isTEV7EwEpyUebGOAMIgm3BlC8ropdughMSLncR5mQYxONdFVhuT9Q/w500-h271/m57+guide+graph.jpg" width="500" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span>M57 guide graph</span></i></td></tr>
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<span>Hmm. Most strange. Two thoughts:</span></div>
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<span>1) My calibration isn't great -- it's not terrible, but it's not orthogonal either. I've had this issue a lot with the off-axis guider. I had a good calibration earlier this month, but after M88 wound up having to sit in a not-ideal place in the image in order to get a guide star in the guider's field-of-view, I rotated the off-axis guider and had to re-calibrate. I'll try re-calibrating again tonight to see if it helps.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1bcLc_cWzxWZBIIxlVeIl9ek1qMtqEfBSLLsccoXpuo1I78TKR6gUSMSEY3HmavNAHPJbmKFowlaoXt_j16N0OcHySimki8XrYYZZ0xo8z_fyOj1Actx0Wv2o3-2iGVAytNDSegStx7E/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="761" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1bcLc_cWzxWZBIIxlVeIl9ek1qMtqEfBSLLsccoXpuo1I78TKR6gUSMSEY3HmavNAHPJbmKFowlaoXt_j16N0OcHySimki8XrYYZZ0xo8z_fyOj1Actx0Wv2o3-2iGVAytNDSegStx7E/w439-h244/guide+cal.png" width="439" /></span></a></div>
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<span>2) Since it's springtime, there's a lot of pollen, spiders, and spiderwebs on various parts out of the mount. Might need to do some cleaning. I cover it with a Telegizmos 365 cover during the day, but plenty of stuff gets on it during the night. The gear boxes seemed sealed pretty tight, but I'll run through with a duster and air-duster and see what I can do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Happiness</span></h2>
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<span>Despite these issues, I'm so happy to be finally honing in on perfection. Or, at least, as good as I can do with all of this light pollution and air pollution! When I have good data to work with, then I can focus more on my image processing. </span></div>
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<span>There is nothing quite like waking up in the morning, going out and powering down the telescope, and seeing that the sequence completed successfully!!</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPYD335Ewa4N8uinvYWgo83Xsh3FcwATFm5UI7R0u8b3K_R8qhsGJWYt2j2TA9Yuu6bC-t_oN4TTNwh0ZgAen-FU2eggu3BH3IzvK7560f-RJ5OCvikXwtB3q5QId1U6ch1iVXRQYVMxc/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPYD335Ewa4N8uinvYWgo83Xsh3FcwATFm5UI7R0u8b3K_R8qhsGJWYt2j2TA9Yuu6bC-t_oN4TTNwh0ZgAen-FU2eggu3BH3IzvK7560f-RJ5OCvikXwtB3q5QId1U6ch1iVXRQYVMxc/w561-h316/2020-05-23_annotated.png" width="561" /></a></div>
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Lots and lots of hard work are, at last, paying off. :D</div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/340-monday-may-25-2020-for-science.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #346 - Monday, May 25, 2020 - For Science!!</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/328-wednesday-may-6-2020-its-workinggggg.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #334 - Wednesday, May 6, 2020 - IT'S WORKINGGGGG</span></a></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-7598790077999137472020-05-09T15:39:00.005-07:002020-10-07T20:11:41.784-07:00#334 - Wednesday, May 6, 2020 - IT'S WORKINGGGGGAs with many complex mechanical and digital systems, fixing one thing often causes two more problems. (Or more!) Thus has been the case with all of my recent equipment upgrades. Luckily, I <i>love</i> troubleshooting (big reason why I became and experimental physicist), so I've spent the last couple nights attacking some new problems.<br />
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<h3>
Focus offsets</h3>
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I got my new PrimaLuce Lab Esatto focuser installed on Saturday! The SCT-threaded connection on it slides into the focuser, and you tighten three set screws into a groove on the adapter. That way, I could set it to the exact angle I wanted, and it's a nice stable connection. On the camera side, I got the 2-inch eyepeice-type adapter because that's the only way to connect my Lumicon off-axis guider, but this one, unlike my previous JMI EV-1 focuser, has a compression ring with three set screws rather than one. So hopefully that will hold things in place much more firmly.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuhjBJ4U9K2TX_tOVtUFjxN7LXQJfJajHGLx26AW9CSTPxULyfE39fmhyphenhyphen7QKIfIZ2sl_fsKrU4ZAD0rcvsuqgN8aR37jPVqCuex5hErxdio8TvOt5gxX4pAUgGTNb44mOJu3qEixHSY78/s1600/2020-05-02+16.21.09+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuhjBJ4U9K2TX_tOVtUFjxN7LXQJfJajHGLx26AW9CSTPxULyfE39fmhyphenhyphen7QKIfIZ2sl_fsKrU4ZAD0rcvsuqgN8aR37jPVqCuex5hErxdio8TvOt5gxX4pAUgGTNb44mOJu3qEixHSY78/s640/2020-05-02+16.21.09+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>From the scope: Meade 0.63x focal reducer, PrimaLuce Lab Esatto focuser, Lumicon off-axis guider (set for ZWO camera backfocus), QHY5L-II guide camera, ZWO 7-position 2-inch electronic filter wheel, and ZWO ASI1600MM Pro camera.</i></div>
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I am now using two different brands of filters -- Astromonik CLS-CCD (light pollution) and RGB filters, and Chroma narrowband filters. They have different thicknesses, so due to the difference indices of refraction, the focus points are shifted between the two filter brands. Since I have an electronic focuser, I can measure the different focus points, program them into Sequence Generator Pro, and it will automatically move the focuser to the difference between the two when I switch filters.</div>
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The first step was to measure those offsets. I set the CLS-CCD filter, and then ran the autofocus utility in Sequence Generator Pro four times. (For the new PrimaLuce Lab Esatto focuser I have, I set the step size to 7,000 steps -- this is how far it will move between focus test points. I didn't want it to move too much, or the more out-of-focus points would be too out of focus for SGP to get accurate star size measurements). I recorded the focus position and HFR (half-flux radius, or measurement of the average size of the stars across the image), and then had it autofocus again. I repeated this for the Ha and OIII filters. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfeYVM9ooi-SI4BUOk4VL-1XWBtYLpsmyRhQ1f4ZcV1mfRqp2h8gxr9Zc5KxaBh-mio_3_3rPtrancjBOn1pRMGAKNZZCDFdukQMoNvVic9xbVV1BKD9SELBnC5jg_SletEGgXfgxFGf4/s1600/focus+measurements.png"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfeYVM9ooi-SI4BUOk4VL-1XWBtYLpsmyRhQ1f4ZcV1mfRqp2h8gxr9Zc5KxaBh-mio_3_3rPtrancjBOn1pRMGAKNZZCDFdukQMoNvVic9xbVV1BKD9SELBnC5jg_SletEGgXfgxFGf4/s640/focus+measurements.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Then I took the average and standard deviation of those measurements, and set those as the focus positions in Sequence Generator Pro.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwQMK58v8_wlWm6bxwlWTna3UoytGPYTzUHu8jVTZLbTrNcK2EJJXEkRqYZ2hJDa0Jlk_WoGEuYsGvl3fl-XJrYfg79E__afgTvaEl87n-bZYQ2xfCYKkk9rdLE3RTUue-ZTryg3VtGo/s1600/filter+offsets++sgp.png"><img border="0" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpwQMK58v8_wlWm6bxwlWTna3UoytGPYTzUHu8jVTZLbTrNcK2EJJXEkRqYZ2hJDa0Jlk_WoGEuYsGvl3fl-XJrYfg79E__afgTvaEl87n-bZYQ2xfCYKkk9rdLE3RTUue-ZTryg3VtGo/s640/filter+offsets++sgp.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>I don't actually have an SII filter -- it's just a filler until I get one later on. Right now, that slot is empty.</i></div>
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Lastly, I needed to get the order of things ironed out in SGP. This has been kind of tough, since I can't just say "do this, then that, then that;" SGP has its methods, and I kind of have to mess with different combinations of settings to bend it to my will.</div>
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I tried first to have it adjust the focus position per filter, and then focus with that filter (by turning off the "Auto focus with filter" option in the auto focus options). With the variances in the offset measurements, I wasn't sure just setting the offset would be enough. </div>
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Note: SGP doesn't use these offsets as absolute positions; rather, it will look at the last time you focused and which filter you used, and calculate the difference between that focus point and what you have set in the offset. For example, if I have the CLS-CCD filter set at 200,000 in the filter wheel data, and the Ha filter at 210,000, and I just ran autofocus with the CLS-CCD filter and it found focus at 190,000, then it will take the difference between the actual focus (190,000) and the value in the filter list (200,000), and adjust accordingly, so that the Ha focus position is set to 200,000. Make sense?</div>
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So I tried having it autofocus with the CLS-CCD filter, then change to the Ha filter and offset the focuser to get it close, and then autofocus with Ha to make sure it's in focus. However, autofocusing with 3nm-wide narrowband filters doesn't work very well. Even with 20s exposure times, I had several stars when it was near focus, but not enough for it to make accurate measurements when it was far from focus. Plus, it took <i>forever</i> to run that way -- 9 focus test points, times 20s exposure time each, plus the time it takes to download and measure the stars in the image. </div>
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So what I did instead tonight was to have it focus always with the CLS-CCD filter (a setting in the Autofocus options), and then it sets the filter offset when it changes filters. Hopefully, this focuser would prove to be good enough that focus would be close enough just using the offsets.</div>
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Guide camera</h3>
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The focus offsets caused another problem: my guide camera wasn't really in focus anymore. I'm using an off-axis guider, and it's before the filter wheel in the optics train because trying to get a guide star through a narrowband filter would be basically impossible. However, its focus is fixed, and moves with the camera, so when I drop in the narrowband filter, and the main camera focuses with the index of refraction difference of that filter, my guide camera is then out-of-focus. Enough so that when I tried running things on Sunday, PHD couldn't hold onto any guide stars, and I didn't get any frames that night. </div>
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Then I got a piece of advice from my astro-buddy Tolga: put the guide camera in focus with the main camera when the focuser is set for halfway in between the Astronomik and Chroma filters. That way, it'll be a little out of focus for both, but not super out of focus for one or the other. Smart! (Of course, the real solution would be to get Chroma filters for my LRGB as well, but that's going to run me like another thousand dollars, and I'm not ready for that yet). So on Monday night, I set the focus for halfway between the two, focused the guide camera, and then PHD was better able to hold onto the guide stars. So that worked!</div>
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Dialing in polar alignment</h3>
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I was curious about how well the mount performs unguided, so on Monday night, I opened up PHD and unticked the "Enable guide output" option in the brain dialog box. This allowed me to see how the guide star moved around without actually sending guide commands to the mount.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSktagN1fxA9nGPBEaxYkgrE5X9OAqwH_KLwKL9SVOqV9Q_qyRjP_PZT1XByIAWQTDH4T6QiywMV_1WJoW_ogmUiOt2Ps8I8NOjiNQzVEzkNY_jlSKWVUrjY90shvaga8gb5zLoVO380s/s1600/2020-05-04.png"><img border="0" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSktagN1fxA9nGPBEaxYkgrE5X9OAqwH_KLwKL9SVOqV9Q_qyRjP_PZT1XByIAWQTDH4T6QiywMV_1WJoW_ogmUiOt2Ps8I8NOjiNQzVEzkNY_jlSKWVUrjY90shvaga8gb5zLoVO380s/s640/2020-05-04.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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It didn't exactly go running off, but it wasn't very good either. Doing this reminded me of a tool in PHD that I've only tried one other time: drift align. It's a way to fine-tune polar alignment by looking at how a star drifts due south and due east or west near the horizon, and then you adjust the altitude and azimuth knobs in an iterative process. I don't have screenshots, but basically you first slew to a star at the meridian and 0 declination for the azimuth adjustment, hit Drift and watch the direction of a plotted trendline for enough samples to even out the noise, and then adjust the azimuth knobs until that trendline is mostly flat. Then you do the same for altitude, but for a star that is due east or west, near the horizon. There's a helpful document for this <a href="https://openphdguiding.org/PHD2_Drift_Alignment.pdf">here</a>. I found that instead of moving the star all the way to the magenta circle, I needed to move it only like halfway to the circle -- all the way would far overshoot. Drift alignment is a real pain and a slow process, but I've been told that it can have a real benefit for permanently-mounted scopes. I'm not mounted on a pier, but I also don't take my gear down, so it stays pretty steady. (Until the next earthquake, of course...)</div>
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After this, I checked whether I needed to update my T-Point model or not after this adjustment -- I slewed to a star, and while it didn't land in the middle, it wasn't super far off, and they already weren't landing in the middle before. So I didn't touch the model. I did re-calibrate PHD, and it looked pretty good.</div>
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A different autoguider?</h3>
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Because my guide stars are so ugly -- partly because the off-axis guider is, well, off-axis, and deep in the coma of my Schmidt-Cassgrain, and partly because the stars aren't quite focused -- I decided I'd give another piece of guiding software a try, just for yucks: Metaguide. I've used it recently for collimation, and I thought it'd be interesting to try out guiding with it. It uses a different principle than every other method of autoguiding out there: Instead of doing long integrations (3-10s) to avoid "chasing the seeing," it sends corrections many times per second to the mount, sort of acting like a slow adpative optics-type thing. It totally turns the thinking on its head, but the author (who spoke about it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZV43ZHNUKM">on TAIC recently</a>) swears by it. My hope was that it would be better able to grab oddly-shaped stars. The interface looks a bit messy at first, but it has a lot of options and tools built in that are really handy. </div>
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I had previously got it set up on my mount and guide camera when I was collimating my C11, so the tricky bits with doing that were already taken care of. Calibrating ran quickly and without issue on a bright star. Then I just needed to play with gain and exposure settings to see how short of an exposure time I could get away with. Unfortunately, I had to do 2s exposures in order to get the guide star some of the time, so it more or less defeated the purpose. It also didn't talk to SGP as smoothly as PHD2 does: it would frequently not "hear" the pause or stop commands, so that when SGP tried to resume, it was still already running, and SGP just sat there until its timeout ended and it's like "sure I'll just go ahead and continue the sequence anyway, assuming it's running." </div>
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So the first frame came down, and oof. It wasn't great. It didn't like run away or do anything crazy, but the guiding was kind of all over the place.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6I3FbtS3Qhb1EBG5eT4kXYx68JGFf24FqE5y9vN7dhru7IdyYEjfSxnBmCbDApLUuJ29Jl2xlEFVnt15DnbvDOr7gv93WGyMHvEMVb_xe46yE0iPvlY9fmiy04Gsyp9fC0uor9mkcvI/s1600/metaguide+1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="496" data-original-width="656" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6I3FbtS3Qhb1EBG5eT4kXYx68JGFf24FqE5y9vN7dhru7IdyYEjfSxnBmCbDApLUuJ29Jl2xlEFVnt15DnbvDOr7gv93WGyMHvEMVb_xe46yE0iPvlY9fmiy04Gsyp9fC0uor9mkcvI/s640/metaguide+1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Cropped image of some stars near M100, 10m exposure in OIII</i></div>
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The next frame was no better.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUrjOemMgKNqC-qVaGjsD6rtTRiTrMmS69RTsVTjqhq11w7qi1J1EMB7zS8tuZIxciulzYt14Bi2FTcDRGPL7UW1R6NhTwYyCqtsqm-CYIwIT4nafbrLXj-pwHOCqvYDHk8WEDlDhQcDg/s1600/metaguide+2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="699" height="486" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUrjOemMgKNqC-qVaGjsD6rtTRiTrMmS69RTsVTjqhq11w7qi1J1EMB7zS8tuZIxciulzYt14Bi2FTcDRGPL7UW1R6NhTwYyCqtsqm-CYIwIT4nafbrLXj-pwHOCqvYDHk8WEDlDhQcDg/s640/metaguide+2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Are there some settings I could may adjust? Perhaps. But with 2s exposure times, when M100 has a pretty bright star right inside my guide camera, I don't think it's going to work out. Not with an off-axis guider at least! Might work better with a guide scope with brighter stars. </div>
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So I switched back to PHD.</div>
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At last, success</h3>
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After all these tweaks over the past couple of nights, I finally, <i>finally</i> had a great night. The forecast called for an exceptionally clear sky. The Moon was full, so I swapped out some of my wideband targets for narrowband ones. The sequence had Ghost of Jupiter Nebula, M100, M51, and M57 Ring Nebula. I did H-alpha on the two galaxies, and Ha and OIII on the two nebulae. I ran out of time on the Ghost of Jupiter, so I didn't get any frames there (it goes behind my lemon tree at about 10 PM, leaving little time after astro-dark), but the rest of my M100 images and my M51 and M57 images came out really, really well. Nice, tight, well-focused and well-guided stars, I could see signal in all the frames, no clouds, everything was great. I didn't get a great number of frames because all my narrowband frames are 10 minutes long, but it did run all night without issue. Yayyyyy!!!!</div>
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I settled on the following autofocus options:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5lo0h4jI_U6_Az8yXqh3Md7CZtr8S-WzNXdrirYfg_sPDGgs3Aw4BFTyrK5kyhy-prm97gBGjB-Igscq_yXgZUKYVek6_mNTrrprkoP3UGY9OOigSnVkHR832SpcW04CcLyL2nsryVQI/s1600/autofocus+options.png"><img border="0" height="446" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5lo0h4jI_U6_Az8yXqh3Md7CZtr8S-WzNXdrirYfg_sPDGgs3Aw4BFTyrK5kyhy-prm97gBGjB-Igscq_yXgZUKYVek6_mNTrrprkoP3UGY9OOigSnVkHR832SpcW04CcLyL2nsryVQI/s640/autofocus+options.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Note: Step size depends </i><b><i>entirely on your focuser.</i> </b><i>My new focuser has a full range of some 400,000 steps. My last focuser had a full range of only 8,000 steps, so the step size was very different.</i></div>
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I am also doing all plate solving with the CLS-CCD filter as well.</div>
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There's not much to see on the galaxy narrowband images, but here's a zoomed-in image of the Ring Nebula, a single 10-minute frame in Ha:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhswxo0r4axH5aAn9Wh6whV2nJq5X_5GZUmNjeLg7Kr-q9Otf9GJEUTxyhMZihO6X6JVa02vcj7Wf8-wJ3Uaf4t715E1lGl2TITc5SrFpEe1u8ouKRW4AC6TVUv3LtbIJ-GVznRIBNRBvY/s1600/ring.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="559" data-original-width="757" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhswxo0r4axH5aAn9Wh6whV2nJq5X_5GZUmNjeLg7Kr-q9Otf9GJEUTxyhMZihO6X6JVa02vcj7Wf8-wJ3Uaf4t715E1lGl2TITc5SrFpEe1u8ouKRW4AC6TVUv3LtbIJ-GVznRIBNRBvY/s640/ring.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I can't see the dim halo around the Ring that I've seen in other images, but it may yet appear on stacking. We shall see :)</div>
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Seeing in the morning that the sequence had run flawlessly the whole night and got a bunch of great images put me in a really, really good mood for the whole rest of the day. A little bit of starshine in these difficult days.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/338-saturday-may-23-2020-more-success.html"><font size="6">Next post: #344 - Saturday, May 23, 2020 - More Success! And some useful diagnostic tools</font></a><br /></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/325-friday-may-1-2020-night-of-problems.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #331 - Friday, May 1, 2020 - A Night of Problems</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-36272504860625554762020-05-03T12:25:00.003-07:002020-10-07T19:57:21.543-07:00#331 - Friday, May 1, 2020 - A Night of ProblemsApologies for the recent long absence of blog posts! I've been keeping log notes every night I run the scopes, but haven't had the time and/or energy lately to write up the blog posts. Because I'm imaging nearly every night these days, I've decided I'm not going to write up every log entry as a blog post anymore -- just the ones where something interesting happens.<br />
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My sister Mary has been running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign back in Spokane, WA, my hometown, with her husband, my parents, and my other sister Melody and her husband. Once the shelter-in-place orders started going into effect, however, they started playing online. And they figured, if we're playing online, why don't we invite Molly?? So I hopped into their campaign at 7th level, and created a dwarf paladin character, the first time I've played a magic-wielding character in a tabletop. (I've only played a few other times with friends and family, usually doing some kind of human rogue Katniss-esque character who's handy with a bow). We play on Thursdays and Fridays now. During a break, I scurried outside around 8:30 PM to set up the scope.<br />
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<h2>
Gear loadout</h2>
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What I've got set up now is my Paramount MyT mount, but I finally caved and swapped out my Celestron 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain for my Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain. The C11 and its big, unwieldy, floppy mirror have been making life difficult. I've been having trouble getting a good calibration model for autoguiding using PHD, I have to re-focus all the time (using autofocus with my JMI EV-1 focuser, but it takes several minutes every hour to do), and because of the long focal length (even with my 0.63x focal reducer, it's 1763mm), I can't always get a star in my off-axis guider, and when I do, it's deep in the coma'd outer edge of the image field, and PHD seems to have a hard time locking onto these cigar-shaped stars. It's been working okay, but I haven't been getting as much data as I could when sequences would abort or the guiding was bad enough that I had to dump quite a few frames.<br />
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The Paramount looks kind of comical with the much-smaller scope attached, especially with the clashing colors.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMMsQSt-7XwuFw0lNJMZFCVazRWQb3-mDF2w-AwOtK0_vuZczj3pazcKWLPrfQSZnZnnJmF1qUQxnpYqUtTpTNkWMnKOv7ybrnv5DyLFEU2nRejhAQmOVBc1EkJPk1Dfvsv6nk8MINHvY/s1600/2020-04-29+19.54.58.jpg"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMMsQSt-7XwuFw0lNJMZFCVazRWQb3-mDF2w-AwOtK0_vuZczj3pazcKWLPrfQSZnZnnJmF1qUQxnpYqUtTpTNkWMnKOv7ybrnv5DyLFEU2nRejhAQmOVBc1EkJPk1Dfvsv6nk8MINHvY/s640/2020-04-29+19.54.58.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
New gear</h3>
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On the back of the C8 is my 0.63x focal reducer still (it's also a field flattener), my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro camera, and my new ZWO 7-position 2-inch filter wheel. I really liked my Starlight Xpress filter wheel, but it only had 5 slots at the 2-inch size, and I recently purchased Chroma 3nm Ha and OIII filters. I'll eventually get an SII filter as well, but have plenty to do with bicolor narrowband and LRGB+narrowband enhancement. The ZWO is working pretty well, and it accepts both M48 mounted filters as well as 50mm-ish unmounted filters, which is very handy. I'm still going to use the Starlight Xpress filter wheel -- I got a 7-position 1.25" carousel for it (one of the things I love about it is how easy it is to swap out carousels, and the fact that you can), and I loaded it up with my Schuler Johnson-Cousins photometric filters and my Astronomik 1.25" RGB filters I bought a while back before I realized that the 1.25" size was too small for the 4/3 chip size of my ASI1600. This way, I'll have a filter wheel handy for doing planetary imaging (using the IR photometric filter as a luminance channel, which I've had a lot of success with in the past), as well as the photometry and variable star observing I want to get into once I get a stable setup on my other mount, the Celestron AVX. Right now the AVX has an 8-inch f/4 Vixen Newtonian that a member of my last astronomy club generously gave me, but I'm having trouble getting the coma corrector to work, and the mount's been having some backlash issues that don't appear to be connected to the meshing of the motor drive gear with the worm drive gear, which is how I usually fix that problem.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj11TxK0L0z0uB7gVBBJ8RsEeTy-_EmxnWiQr-wAPAvgyGZTGJnKFqdb3wqb9hgWsCvF1DVYh7ABzYBWlq6mHXRaCQYb5Hb0vF47TSVxz4IXS6bmBKWJW8_9WSU0fHMFJJZLek_YMaJwI/s1600/2020-04-07+17.37.41+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj11TxK0L0z0uB7gVBBJ8RsEeTy-_EmxnWiQr-wAPAvgyGZTGJnKFqdb3wqb9hgWsCvF1DVYh7ABzYBWlq6mHXRaCQYb5Hb0vF47TSVxz4IXS6bmBKWJW8_9WSU0fHMFJJZLek_YMaJwI/s640/2020-04-07+17.37.41+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
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<i>Happily, the ZWO 7-position filter wheel is nearly the same size as the Starlight Xpress filter wheel. I was not expecting that. (Image is on the C11)</i></div>
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<i>Also, you can see one of my kitties, Nova, in the background :)</i></div>
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Speaking of new gear, I also recently ordered a new autofocuser. I've been using a JMI EV-1 that my uncle gave me, which is a Crayford-style focuser that can be used manually or motorized with a hand paddle. It doesn't have a USB connection (it's an older model), but Shoestring Astronomy sells an FCUSB adapter that's been working flawlessly. (It has one of those 3.5mm jacks, which can plug directly into the Paramount MyT and be run from TheSkyX, but I needed one I could talk to via ASCOM so I could use it with Sequence Generator Pro). The JMI focuser worked decently well for me with just my parfocal Astronomik LRGB filters, although since it's relative and not absolute as far as its position, it would often hit one limit or the other while SGP was focusing it if there were clouds and stuff like that, so I had to reset it fairly often. But it did a decent job. </div>
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Until I got the Chroma narrowband filters. They're not parfocal with my Astronomik filters, so I needed to set filter offsets. I ran autofocus 5x each and recorded the focus value in a spreadsheet, and then took the average value for each filter -- luminance, Ha, and OIII (since I decided to base the offset from the L filter). The variance in the focal point varied pretty widely though -- hundreds of steps on a total length of only 8,000 steps. But, since Schmidt-Cassegrains and their long focal lengths have a pretty wide focus point, I blamed the variance on this, and set the average value as the filter offset, but had autofocus run again after the filter change and just used the offset as a starting point. This took a lot longer, of course, since I had to take longer exposures with the narrowband filters, but I was okay with that. </div>
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The first night I tried running the narrowband filters was a disaster. The filter offsets still left the image pretty out of focus, and the SGP autofocuser really needs to start with the scope close to focus, or else it has issues measuring the HFRs of the giant donut stars and things get very messy. Confused as to why this was happening, I did a quick test: I slewed to a bright star and set the luminance filter, focused, and then racked the focuser out and then back in to the exact same place that was in focus. Except, now, it was far from focus! I don't think it's backlash though -- I think the tube, being Crayford style, is slipping. My camera, off-axis guider, and filter wheel are quite heavy all together, and I don't think it can quite handle it. So for a while, I just used my LRGB filters and no narrowband. :(</div>
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Then I finally decided to go ahead and just buy a new focuser. I went with the PrimaLuce Lab Esatto focuser, which is a modified Crayford style but is fully motorized, no manual control. It has a payload capacity of 11 lbs, and has a much smaller step size -- only 0.04 microns! It has something like 400,000+ steps, haha. But the modified Crayford style promises not to slip, so we shall see. I got the 2-inch version, and got an SCT adapter for one side, and a 2-inch eyepiece adapter on the other side, since that's the only way my OAG can connect. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKcNRoDAnWStaHHVRaBvJNmby1u_t9HJcmTbT3lQZeKydOa4N54OkveyjGdbb5GYNA39OocGFWtYfnuOIzK1IR7iHbFYcI51ov0zb2YHiHWqepWWqxSvLJrvyCaqm1S__pYMlAoDGZ03I/s1600/esatto-2-inches-robotic-microfocuser_4.jpg"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKcNRoDAnWStaHHVRaBvJNmby1u_t9HJcmTbT3lQZeKydOa4N54OkveyjGdbb5GYNA39OocGFWtYfnuOIzK1IR7iHbFYcI51ov0zb2YHiHWqepWWqxSvLJrvyCaqm1S__pYMlAoDGZ03I/s400/esatto-2-inches-robotic-microfocuser_4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.primalucelab.com/astronomy/esatto-2-robotic-microfocuser.html">See it on the PrimaLuce website</a></div>
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The Esatto connects via USB-C, and requires 1A of power. If you're using USB 2.0, that only supplies 0.5A, so you have to use the 12V DC connection to power it. But, if you're using USB 3.0, or have a powered USB hub like I have (or using the USB hub on the back of the ZWO camera, which supplies 1A), then you don't have to use the external power. I tested it inside (where I had to use the 12V power -- apparently my tablet's USB 3.0 port doesn't do 1A), and after upgrading the ASCOM platform from 6.3 to 6.4 SP1 in order for the PrimaLuce ASCOM driver to work, I got it moving! Very exciting. </div>
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I didn't have time to install it today, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to get it tested and configured before D&D started, so I will do that tomorrow. </div>
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<h2 style="text-align: left;">
Tonight's imaging</h2>
<h3>
Weird problems</h3>
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After I got the scope uncovered and my laptop connected, I went back inside and controlled things from my desktop while we played D&D using TeamViewer. First, I wanted to re-calibrate PHD because the guiding last night was baaaaaaad. However, I tried like four different times on two different spots in the sky, and each had a nice, round, bright star to use, but the calibrations were garbage. And more garbage than usual!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRqTX10B9EQz6ZPA1I-FJ8XHXA4aQ3EZzvpTCuZSFUyskflc8g22Cdai1ALlutvv8c16910tJPKnkGLd6V5ixwinQNY7c-GgoA6RLLCPNhJe7zHqbEbqJ9AGYmzHjHAtNzec2P1HRguKU/s1600/2020-05-01+%25281%2529.png"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRqTX10B9EQz6ZPA1I-FJ8XHXA4aQ3EZzvpTCuZSFUyskflc8g22Cdai1ALlutvv8c16910tJPKnkGLd6V5ixwinQNY7c-GgoA6RLLCPNhJe7zHqbEbqJ9AGYmzHjHAtNzec2P1HRguKU/s640/2020-05-01+%25281%2529.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhff9JZlPxrMtB6ifNDXwJAB37GfjY2x6M4CUpfxRE123PBY0D4Mda3zG5ECESiusnlEMuy8U-S8BatOPOWDtMUpF1MnTUSoOaFIsYzDWfIesBRXDQ7Bb8mgszbEBhnddPFK6fP6dYvLt0/s1600/2020-05-01.png"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhff9JZlPxrMtB6ifNDXwJAB37GfjY2x6M4CUpfxRE123PBY0D4Mda3zG5ECESiusnlEMuy8U-S8BatOPOWDtMUpF1MnTUSoOaFIsYzDWfIesBRXDQ7Bb8mgszbEBhnddPFK6fP6dYvLt0/s640/2020-05-01.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Like, what?????</div>
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After seeing these, I decided to do another full calibration of the mount (I had just done one last night to account for the offset in position between the C11 and the C8, as well as the fact that the C8 has less mirror flop and should give me a better calibration). I started the automated T-Point procedure in TheSkyX, but absolutely none of the images were plate-solving. I checked the pixel scale, and ran outside to see if clouds had rolled in -- nope, all was good. So I connected the camera to SharpCap instead, and the image was weirdly dim. So I shut down all the software and rebooted the computer. SequenceGenerator Pro wouldn't open, so I rebooted it again. Still no dice. So I did a little Googling, and saw that sometimes it can be an ASCOM corruption issue. And, seeing as the only change I'd made recently was upgrading the ASCOM platform, I decided to uninstall and reinstall it. When I went to uninstall it, I chose the Repair option instead. This worked! SGP finally opened. (I needed it to control the focuser, since my stars were suddenly out of focus). </div>
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Once I had SGP up and running again, I racked the focuser in to try and bring it back into focus, but I hit 0 before it came into focus. That was weird. So I went outside to reset it -- put it back in the center-ish and then focus the primary mirror. I also checked the scope to make sure everything was okay there -- and saw the cause of the problem: the OAG had partially slipped out of the JMI focuser, again. It is a compression-ring-style connection, but with only one screw. It slips out <i>all the time</i> and it's really annoying. So I pushed it back in and tightened the screw as hard as I could, re-focused the primary, and then ran back inside (we were still playing D&D and were engaged in a tough battle). </div>
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Finally, I started running T-Point again, and I also changed the binning from 2x2 to 1x1, since it was calculating the pixel scale with it at 1x1 I think, and not 2x2. Once I made that fix (plus all the other stuff), plate solving was working again! The majority of the 48 sample points solved, and the ones that didn't were likely blocked by my trees or something (I have a rough horizon model loaded, so in some places it's not quite accurate). </div>
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Once that was complete, and I ran Super Model and re-did the polar alignment (when I swapped out telescopes, I also adjusted the position of the mount a bit, since one of the tripod feet had slipped into a crack on my concrete pad, and I didn't trust the polar alignment I did last night with the possibly-messed-up T-Point model), I then re-did my PHD autoguiding calibration. This one came out <i>much</i> better -- actually, it's the best I've yet gotten with this mount!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJFhvFRBEUmW3mP9QG-nyVpuQamYThW1PeqKZqXq2pgfGE4O9T5JGnxSudHqEfmx8hUTqhSleJpFJDC50ykNuBYxpFrkwn2Mp7clH_iOpoAUpee5FFluazUOFGFuMz2imBoxWS1OymIPM/s1600/2020-05-02+%25281%2529.png"><img border="0" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJFhvFRBEUmW3mP9QG-nyVpuQamYThW1PeqKZqXq2pgfGE4O9T5JGnxSudHqEfmx8hUTqhSleJpFJDC50ykNuBYxpFrkwn2Mp7clH_iOpoAUpee5FFluazUOFGFuMz2imBoxWS1OymIPM/s640/2020-05-02+%25281%2529.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Very exciting.</div>
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Imaging, finally</h3>
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Once that was all done, it was about 11 PM, and I could <i>finally</i> start imaging. (And we finally wiped out all the enemies in the dungeon chamber). Clouds were due to roll in around 1 AM, but I figured I'd squeeze in those two hours anyway. (Benefit of having a backyard setup!) By this point, the target of the moment was M100, a nice spiral galaxy. Plate solving to center it was having issues for some reason, but it eventually figured out where it was pointing and started the imaging run. Guiding was a nice 0.69 arcsec RMS. Aaaaaaand then the clouds rolled in early, but after I went to bed.</div>
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<h3>
More fail</h3>
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I went outside in the morning, and for the second time this week, the mount had run itself into the tripod leg, and instead of stopping tracking like it had earlier in the week, the mount was instead alarming and TSX said "Unable to move." This is the first time the alarm has gone off, and luckily it was quiet-ish -- hopefully it didn't disturb my neighbors, because according to Sequence Generator Pro, it'd probably been going off since about 2 AM. I quickly parked the mount and made sure all the camera connections were still straight.</div>
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So usually when it clouds out, SGP will try and plate solve or focus or something, it will fail, and it will keep trying until it's time to meridian flip or the sequence end time is hit, at which point it will abort the sequence, park the mount, and disconnect equipment. However, occasionally the failure mode is the fault of Planewave's PlateSolve2 plat solver that I'm using, and sometimes when it's cloudy, it'll get an error saying something like "Instance of object does not exist" or something like that. In that case, SGP has no idea about the error, and it's waiting on PlateSolve2 to send it the solution. Since it's waiting, it doesn't check for sequence end time or meridian flip time, and just keeps tracking. And tracking, and tracking....until the scope hits the pier, when TSX takes over and stops the tracking, thank goodness. (On other mounts, this can actually mess up the gears, since not all mounts are "smart" enough to detect a blockage, and will keep trying to push). I should eventually just get a cloud monitor, haha. But usually the failure happens before PlateSolve2 runs, like a lost guide star or inability to focus. I should probably report this bug to Planewave.</div>
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Anyway, very long story short, no images were acquired tonight. :( But I'm installing the new focuser tomorrow, and now I have a solid T-Point model and PHD calibration, so once I characterize the focuser, set the autofocus settings, and measure the filter offsets, I'll be ready to go! It's supposed to be cloudy tomorrow night, but clear on Sunday night, all night. So I'll work on the focuser after The Astro Imaging Channel broadcast has ended. :)<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/05/328-wednesday-may-6-2020-its-workinggggg.html">Next post: #334 - Wednesday, May 6, 2020 - IT'S WORKINGGGGG</a></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2020/03/273-thursday-january-9-2020-astro.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #273 - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - An ""Astro-Modified DSLR""</span></a><br /></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-20389207717730171202020-01-12T12:12:00.000-08:002020-03-14T12:12:35.049-07:00#274 - Saturday, January 11, 2020Before making dinner and then heading out to the Eastbay Astronomical Society meeting, I got my scopes setup -- my Takahashi FSQ-106N on my Paramount MyT, with my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro camera and Astronomik H-alpha filter, as well as my recently-built astro camera rig, my ZWO ASI294MC Pro with my Nikon 70-300mm lens and the Astronomik CLS-CCD filter, all loaded onto my Celestron AVX mount. In addition, since I had two rigs running, I thought it might be fun to do another timelapse, so I set up one of my DSLRs on a tripod to do that.<br />
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While at the meeting, I remoted into my data acquisition machine to make sure everything got started up smoothly -- and it did indeed! So satisfying when things just work :D<br />
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Tracking on the AVX was looking good. On the Paramount, I couldn't remember if I had re-calibrated guiding in PHD after re-building the mount after going home for Christmas. Since I left my guide camera and guide scope attached to the main telescope the whole time, I shouldn't have to re-calibrate, but you never know when things get knocked a little off-kilter. So I re-calibrated it anyway.<br />
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I went through the frames in the morning -- a few sets of thin clouds had rolled through periodically, but I still got quite a few frames over the course of the night. One of my Orion constellation widefield frames through the camera lens had some satellites pass through -- one was a really bright, single streak, although I couldn't find it in SkySafari or Heavens Above. Another was actually two side-by-side, and with one tumbling (you can tell it's tumbling because the light is brighter and dimmer across the frame). I couldn't identify what they were either; potentially a tumbling rocket body.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVFyLJtxaaxZsOYHoT4s6bJB9DutJL4SzLr5iQFJAk5rBKFRwLaOep0xfxwNsJsS17HwZACioRV7gDRDVut0UJtjcvJuPP5O3-AZw_5yPQnpgv1jY-SMJ0TUIkZweS8B9YxNUbAUTkSl0/s1600/orion_wide_Light_300sec_1x1_-20C_RGB_frame16.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVFyLJtxaaxZsOYHoT4s6bJB9DutJL4SzLr5iQFJAk5rBKFRwLaOep0xfxwNsJsS17HwZACioRV7gDRDVut0UJtjcvJuPP5O3-AZw_5yPQnpgv1jY-SMJ0TUIkZweS8B9YxNUbAUTkSl0/s640/orion_wide_Light_300sec_1x1_-20C_RGB_frame16.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Given how bright this one is, it's very possible that it's actually an airplane, but at a high enough altitude that you can only see one streak.</i></div>
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<i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDU1oMcV2FBh79_DkyCuVyRr9S9aWiTEQvwppuZtl3plxOP1z1BWct4ikAYhmd6a_SFPXcP6wNe8D_1gYPcu1z9WZ39-aOzijFHrhmUqAmHosZQs_SYK3_StPzJUAPitHlcfy3MX5KMM/s1600/orion_wide_Light_300sec_1x1_-20C_RGB_frame25.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDU1oMcV2FBh79_DkyCuVyRr9S9aWiTEQvwppuZtl3plxOP1z1BWct4ikAYhmd6a_SFPXcP6wNe8D_1gYPcu1z9WZ39-aOzijFHrhmUqAmHosZQs_SYK3_StPzJUAPitHlcfy3MX5KMM/s640/orion_wide_Light_300sec_1x1_-20C_RGB_frame25.jpg" width="640" /></a></i></div>
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<i>You'll have to ignore the fact that the streaks are red -- these are non-color-corrected screenshots from the raw image file.</i></div>
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And here's the timelapse!</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/03/273-thursday-january-9-2020-astro.html">Previous post: #273 - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - An ""Astro-Modified DSLR""</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-15523238718931541802020-01-10T15:55:00.003-08:002020-10-07T19:46:44.934-07:00#273 - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - An ""Astro-Modified DSLR""A problem with DSLR cameras is that they have a spectrum filter on them to make the images look very close in color to how the human eye perceives it. While great for daytime imaging, it inhibits the camera's performance for astrophotography, particularly because like the human eye, the spectrum filter passes very little red light. Of course, if you've seen all of the nebula images I've taken, there is quite a lot of red-glowing gas out there in the universe. This makes sense, considering that hydrogen is by far the most abundant element, and that red glow is from hydrogen!<br />
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There are services out there that will remove the spectrum filter from your DSLR for a couple hundred bucks, and Canon, Nikon, and Sony (and probably some others) sell astro versions of at least one of their cameras (although they are pricey!). The thing is, after spending all that money, you still don't have a cooled camera. So while it may be more sensitive to red, it's still going to be just as noisy.<br />
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Instead of spending $2,500 for the Canon EOS Ra, or $3,800 for the Nikon 810a, you can spend $1,000 for a cooled astrophotography-specific camera, like the ZWO ASI294MC Pro. No spectrum filter (or UV/IR filter for that matter -- useful for imaging the planets in UV and IR), <i>and</i> it's cooled. So an experiment I've been wanting to try for a while is using a color astro camera with a camera lens to do some widefield stuff. (I also want to capture hydrogen alpha data with a monochrome camera, but that experiment will happen later). I finally had the chance to <a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/271-sunday-january-5-2020-new-kind-of.html">assemble that setup</a> this past weekend, after I bought a T-thread-to-Nikon bayonet adapter. I couldn't use it right away last weekend because I didn't quite have the spacing correct -- I needed a little bit less separation between the lens and the camera in order to bring it to focus at infinity. The solution was to swap out the female-threaded connector on the filter wheel with a male-threaded one so that I could attach my ZWO camera directly to the wheel without the male-to-female adapter ring that adds a couple of millimeters. (The Starlight Xpress filter wheel has removable connectors so that you can attach the size/thread that you need).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggpB3aX_hF05Len1uk0ddFtDy55yy8GeUs-08xaduCEZ9veb-5T490MDngR7CJjGX-uF44pPPmt7IVlST5CjNDlvkchMc7JD91zaRikQagvFS9PNDwRyRGHE-Iz4oFYkDDONceDISM0aQ/s1600/2020-01-09+17.17.18+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggpB3aX_hF05Len1uk0ddFtDy55yy8GeUs-08xaduCEZ9veb-5T490MDngR7CJjGX-uF44pPPmt7IVlST5CjNDlvkchMc7JD91zaRikQagvFS9PNDwRyRGHE-Iz4oFYkDDONceDISM0aQ/s640/2020-01-09+17.17.18+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>From left to right: Nikon 70-300mm zoom lens, M42-Nikon bayonet adapter, Starlight Xpress filter wheel, ZWO ASI294MC Pro attached without the male-to-female M42 ring. (M42 and T-thread are talking about the same thing).</i></div>
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<i>The silver clamp is one that ZWO sells for their cameras.</i></div>
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I connected the camera to my tablet once again and pointed it out the window at a power pole across the street. I focused the lens, and I was able to bring it into focus!!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlIyO-Nv3NjrWAOd0bY2-FPfaLnfqqktlrTltQSXNXmWxvCBXNOjSVtnRmSZjYhZj_j4xeAbKq2tmsXE3k4aA5yNmIy6SFh2kI1p-PD29yGMLHy5OnUP8uyL2knmezliU7U9kMU8VuodA/s1600/Screenshot+2020-01-09+17.21.26.png"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlIyO-Nv3NjrWAOd0bY2-FPfaLnfqqktlrTltQSXNXmWxvCBXNOjSVtnRmSZjYhZj_j4xeAbKq2tmsXE3k4aA5yNmIy6SFh2kI1p-PD29yGMLHy5OnUP8uyL2knmezliU7U9kMU8VuodA/s640/Screenshot+2020-01-09+17.21.26.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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The next step was to actually get it attached to my mount. The clamp from ZWO has a tripod-sized connection, not a Vixen-sized one, so I needed a way to bolt it to a Vixen dovetail. I tried just bolting it to a spare one I had, but the side with the grooves in it so that the bolt head would not interfere with actually attaching it to the mount was on the wrong side for the polarity to be right to attach the dovetail rail to the mount. (Sorry, hard to explain without pictures...which I forgot to take). So instead, I grabbed this short wooden dovetail I had from another scope, which has a few 1/4-inch holes in it, and attached it to that. Got it all connected! I attached it to my Celestron AVX mount.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUPoS-a0fSYLxQbMxekCYD1ByRB-9C5u8rkX9AIX8EFr2k3wLOCCGziUfoWE-zzXGNshwYaLCbENumXaFGKdyxULb120dTt9OZIEZzZ1jJG-zaGUBiTVzVCU_MnZde5IIn_qDVoQGmybE/s1600/2020-01-09+17.38.26.jpg"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUPoS-a0fSYLxQbMxekCYD1ByRB-9C5u8rkX9AIX8EFr2k3wLOCCGziUfoWE-zzXGNshwYaLCbENumXaFGKdyxULb120dTt9OZIEZzZ1jJG-zaGUBiTVzVCU_MnZde5IIn_qDVoQGmybE/s640/2020-01-09+17.38.26.jpg" width="640" /></a> </div>
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It was getting darker as I finished putting things together, so it was time to grab the laptops and get rolling. In addition to this novel rig, I also ran my Takahashi FSQ-106N refractor with my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro and a hydrogen-alpha filter atop my Paramount MyT. Over on the AVX with the camera lens, I slewed to Aldeberan to focus (I left the mount aligned from when I had another telescope on it), and I added a calibration point after centering it. To focus, I grabbed a tiny Bahtinov mask perfect for camera lenses that I had, but even with 2-second exspoures, a high gain, and a super stretch on the histogram, I couldn't quite see all three diffraction spikes with the lens at 70mm. So I got it somewhat focused with that, and then getting the star as small as possible. There was a little ring around the star because my lens is pretty achromatic, but it did, indeed, come to focus! Very exciting.</div>
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The next challenge was trying to get the plate solver to work so that I could get targets accurately centered. I messed around with the settings in PlateSolve2, which is the plate solve program by PlaneWave that I use within SequenceGenerator Pro, but couldn't get it to successfully plate solve -- I think the images were just too big of a field, at 15x10 degrees. I also didn't see a way for it to use a subframe or a ROI (region of interest). After some Googling, I ended up just using Astrometry.net's online blind plate solver, which is much slower, but it worked!</div>
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The first target I queued up in SGP is one I've been wanting to do with a "spectrum-modified" camera for a while, which is an Orion constellation widefield, including Barnard's Loop. It wouldn't be high enough until 8 PM though, so I added a widefield of the Taurus region, to get M45 (Pleaides Cluster) on one side of the frame, and the California Nebula on the other. </div>
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After a couple of subframes came down looking at Taurus, I took a look at them and remembered that this lens has quite a lot of curvature -- I can really only use about the inner half to 2/3rds of it. The framing at 70mm put M45 and the California Nebula both in the nasty part of either side of the lens, so I changed the target location to center M45 instead. When it was slewing there, it took a weirdly long time (I was doing this from indoors), so I thought maybe it was meridian-flipping. But it shouldn't have been time for that yet. The plate solve solution was also waaaay far off in right ascension, and it wasn't getting better as SGP re-centered my mount. So I went outside to see what was up, and yes, it did flip, but it was hitting my software slew limit for that side of the pier. (I have it set to not go beyond 90 degrees, aka straight up, since my AVX has a loose dec axis, and the axis can slip out from the gears, causing problems). For some reason, my AVX keeps resetting the meridian setting to "favor west," so I disabled the meridian setting (again) and went back inside. When I re-started the sequence, it went back over to looking at the eastern sky -- perfect. While it started imaging, I went to work figuring out what target to have it do after the Orion constellation. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVhAUFpoEzz9UGXDd-z9pqwmEHyzo1DXGjXpiKxmp_y-C7H1-JVcCfPoX72mTDlNXt6yZoyFwQ7fEmxAstt_72FBc0OISGWpZMerdKjfBu2D4BpKGH-aaxfGasuUBWcZ1wLWj8u8hzvHQ/s1600/m45.jpg"><img border="0" height="434" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVhAUFpoEzz9UGXDd-z9pqwmEHyzo1DXGjXpiKxmp_y-C7H1-JVcCfPoX72mTDlNXt6yZoyFwQ7fEmxAstt_72FBc0OISGWpZMerdKjfBu2D4BpKGH-aaxfGasuUBWcZ1wLWj8u8hzvHQ/s640/m45.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Single 5-minute subframe on the Pleiades Cluster with my 70mm lens and ZWO ASI294MC Pro (with a light pollution filter)</i></div>
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Back over on the Takahashi, the sequence hadn't actually started yet because the cooler on the camera hadn't reached the set temperature yet. But it had been running for a while...it was only at 0.5C, and only 12% power! Why? And it wasn't increasing the power. Ah crap. Did I mess something up when <a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/271-sunday-january-5-2020-new-kind-of.html">I opened it up to clean the sensor</a>? I connected it to SharpCap and turned on the cooler there, and it seemed to function normally. Phew! So I disconnected and reconnected everything in SGP and restarted the program, and then it worked normally after that. Weird.</div>
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Meanwhile, my first Orion constellation image came down -- I could see M42 quite well, the Flame and Horsehead Nebulae a bit, but no Barnard Nebula. It was probably buried in the light pollution, I figured -- it's also a full Moon tonight. So I changed the exposure time from 3 minutes to flipping back and forth between 1 minute and 5 minutes.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW_gP6MFeyh50Gzkx1ohLZBmoEO3mjzHKcfF9HoBky5n0uWTSOutXViWP2Ck2Gx4lh2JlmTUiQsszLfnzPpkfiKCG_AaWNDKQzqWtoJkGTTLe3e_IkY_qIdu2pCmPqAdtyXPf1CFHvr3U/s1600/orion.jpg"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW_gP6MFeyh50Gzkx1ohLZBmoEO3mjzHKcfF9HoBky5n0uWTSOutXViWP2Ck2Gx4lh2JlmTUiQsszLfnzPpkfiKCG_AaWNDKQzqWtoJkGTTLe3e_IkY_qIdu2pCmPqAdtyXPf1CFHvr3U/s640/orion.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Single 3-minute frame on the Orion's Belt area, 70mm camera lens, ZWO ASI294MC Pro (with a light pollution filter)</i> </div>
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It was 8 PM then, time to go make some dinner! Before doing that, I added a few more targets I came up with to the camera lens sequence: the Seagull Nebula (probably won't come out well, but why not try), the Beehive Cluster (I don't typically do open clusters, but I needed something), and the Coma Berenices region centered on the Needle Galaxy.</div>
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In the morning, I went to check on things; the Paramount setup aborted due to a failed meridian flip at some point, and didn't run my last target for the night, galaxy M106. I also only get one frame on the Medusa Nebula. I went through the log, but couldn't quite figure out what exactly made it abort. In addition, I forgot to tick the "run" box for the 5-minute-long frames, so they didn't run. On the other hand, the sequence for the camera lens over on the AVX ran all night and completed successfully.</div>
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We shall see how this experiment turns out!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.astronomolly.com/2020/05/325-friday-may-1-2020-night-of-problems.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #331 - Friday, May 1, 2020 - A Night of Problems</span></a><br /></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/272-monday-january-6-2020-errors-errors.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #272 - Monday, January 6, 2020 - Errors, Errors Er'ywhere</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-74060706851831285512020-01-07T16:52:00.000-08:002020-03-07T15:57:00.144-08:00#272 - Monday, January 6, 2020 - Errors, Errors Er'ywhereYet another clear night! :D:D Winter is shaping up to not be so bad around here...<br />
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With a fattening Moon, I imaged it in twilight before connecting the rest of my gear.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-lXYJ1Y5tiTC9J6hK7T00aqa8EVor-BdGYfIVKz3AtShxpfZAB8-1WRiglCYFHGerfa8ld2tS0aYEipkIhhCBbWZ3Z7sPbI9rMLndUpctG2BtNplVqj838QjLeDgYkUr1m1PEtviR64A/s1600/moon_37_1_1_1+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-lXYJ1Y5tiTC9J6hK7T00aqa8EVor-BdGYfIVKz3AtShxpfZAB8-1WRiglCYFHGerfa8ld2tS0aYEipkIhhCBbWZ3Z7sPbI9rMLndUpctG2BtNplVqj838QjLeDgYkUr1m1PEtviR64A/s640/moon_37_1_1_1+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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It's just so darn pretty through the refractor. The hydrogen alpha filter also helps, since the red wavelength of light it passes is less disturbed by the atmosphere than bluer shades, so it's nice and sharp. </div>
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Despite how well things went last night, things can't go well for too long -- that would violate Murphy's Law! Which everyone knows is scientific fact. ;} Sequence Generator Pro would not talk to PHD, the autoguiding software. It kept saying that it wouldn't accept pulse guide commands. I haven't changed anything, I swear! So I messed around with the TheSkyX driver settings some more (whoever puts "the" in their software name is slightly annoying.). I ticked the "Enable Tracking Offsets" and "Enable PulseGuide", and unticked "Use DirectGuide."</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhImxebkYaZBNmNIjbT0KRakZOaaz-k614mn405CGnLHYQfxcUAEkl6dYrot_mrVdyH2ulyxszbeicHElshzyfjGDKYRecajSm7UydvilD3VWS-fwFV1sIW65jQpYCuuapzEdGeuBm_c78/s1600/Screenshot+2020-01-07+07.47.24.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhImxebkYaZBNmNIjbT0KRakZOaaz-k614mn405CGnLHYQfxcUAEkl6dYrot_mrVdyH2ulyxszbeicHElshzyfjGDKYRecajSm7UydvilD3VWS-fwFV1sIW65jQpYCuuapzEdGeuBm_c78/s640/Screenshot+2020-01-07+07.47.24.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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I'm not sure what settings I had previously to make it work, but this did seem to work -- the mount connected, and guiding worked fine. Well, about as fine as it has been the last couple of nights, which has not been stellar...like 1.8 arcsecond RMS. At 10 minute exposures, the stars do elongate a bit with that kind of error. It's mostly in RA; declination showed much smaller error, around 0.5 arcsec. One of my astro-buddies on the The Astro Imaging Channel (and again...), Terry, suggested I check for any cable tug. This could very well be the case, since I recently took everything apart and put it all back together when I went home for Christmas. My cable bundle was a little tight from where I had it attached to the mount base up to where it's attached to the dovetail saddle when it's rolled all the way over to point south, so I unhooked it from the mount base because I couldn't find a better spot to secure it. I'll work on that.</div>
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That little fix didn't improve the guiding, however. I disabled PEC (periodic error correction) in TheSkyX just to see, but that didn't make a difference either. I'm not sure why it's suddenly not great.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgFx5ADB_TrBzkpA9tcszGQwJ6COqEkUzrcTGtr2tCmLZrD4Fuq8D8gvb2BwpkVxzwn_yj5ipy6vEDDQzYOj8PkNjpphJaq7HLhl57dsYN1zH1-Ak7nuf302sft8EulM3ohEvA99VS1Mg/s1600/Screenshot+2020-01-06+22.34.38.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgFx5ADB_TrBzkpA9tcszGQwJ6COqEkUzrcTGtr2tCmLZrD4Fuq8D8gvb2BwpkVxzwn_yj5ipy6vEDDQzYOj8PkNjpphJaq7HLhl57dsYN1zH1-Ak7nuf302sft8EulM3ohEvA99VS1Mg/s640/Screenshot+2020-01-06+22.34.38.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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I checked in on the system around 9:45 PM, and it was erroring out! The mount had disconnected from TheSkyX, which was reporting a loss of communications error, which was weird. So I went out to check the cables, and they looked fine, so I disconnected and reconnected the mount USB cable. TheSkyX still wouldn't connect, so I disconnected everything in all my software, unplugged and replugged the main USB cable, and tried again. TSX finally worked again, so I restarted the sequence and went back inside. </div>
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After washing the dinner dishes, I checked again, and it wasn't erroring, but Sequence Generator Pro was stuck on "resuming guider." PHD was unable to talk to the camera, as it turned out. This happens fairly often when I disconnect the USB cable from the guide camera while PHD is still open, even if I disconnected it from PHD first. So I restarted PHD, and it worked fine. But a few minutes later, it errored again, with TSX reporting loss of communications once again. So maybe my USB hub was breaking down? I ran inside and grabbed one from one of my other cable bundles that I wasn't using and swapped it out. It seemed to be holding after that -- phew!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRmKfIdPUFYeAx7Bc-CDJ5JU5qGOYEQH5KbSaQGPkcBGSgjK8ICdjG6D_RLguO9qkpFS3KaPG0OsEwg8VFvWlS_-ae02e5pfot-RPAjDWWY3pWShv6viuPLGi99Lt6maq-TCcFaYPxSAc/s1600/2dd70e3615d3087b1d3e1dedfa4727c6b78a1e8706d8f7c7447cadc1e885e27c.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRmKfIdPUFYeAx7Bc-CDJ5JU5qGOYEQH5KbSaQGPkcBGSgjK8ICdjG6D_RLguO9qkpFS3KaPG0OsEwg8VFvWlS_-ae02e5pfot-RPAjDWWY3pWShv6viuPLGi99Lt6maq-TCcFaYPxSAc/s640/2dd70e3615d3087b1d3e1dedfa4727c6b78a1e8706d8f7c7447cadc1e885e27c.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I went online to come up with one more target for the early morning hours, and settled on getting some H-alpha data for the galaxy M106. I have some color data of it already from this same scope and camera, so now I'm going to add some H-alpha to it!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5IVBnUkTDb68OaG98vhCBt0FRiCS5pE_2TGrMQX23XRBaYBfVgDQoLLgloodZJ_GqvmuxZKWaUYm3YW1goDUrkEG5pommrk5e9s_EVy7ckJWy1GkWB3gz7Wrl1h_7mnKtsrRS-cMw8SQ/s1600/m106.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5IVBnUkTDb68OaG98vhCBt0FRiCS5pE_2TGrMQX23XRBaYBfVgDQoLLgloodZJ_GqvmuxZKWaUYm3YW1goDUrkEG5pommrk5e9s_EVy7ckJWy1GkWB3gz7Wrl1h_7mnKtsrRS-cMw8SQ/s640/m106.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Zoomed in on M106, 10-minute single subframe, H-alpha filter.</i></div>
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<i>That's gonna look reeeeeaaallll nice!</i><br />
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/03/273-thursday-january-9-2020-astro.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #273 - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - An ""Astro-Modified DSLR""</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/271-sunday-january-5-2020-new-kind-of.html">Previous post: #271 - Sunday, January 5, 2020 - A New Kind of Problem</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-47751981026622471652020-01-06T16:24:00.001-08:002020-10-07T14:45:41.837-07:00#271 - Sunday, January 5, 2020 - A New Kind of Problem<h3>
Camera sensor</h3>
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In astrophotography, as with just about anything that has mechanical or digital components, things are always breaking down. If it's not one thing, it's another! While I continue to make progress on getting my new mount to work smoothly, I had a new kind of issue today, this time with my camera!<br />
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I went outside to swap out my color camera for my monochrome camera on the Takahashi refractor, and I remembered a really weird pattern I saw on the mono camera's sensor (ZWO ASI1600MM Pro) when I was aligning the Celestron AVX mount. I didn't get a screenshot, but it was like a row of smallish shadow-dots. I looked at the business end of the camera, and sure enough, there was the line of tiny dots on the window. So I grabbed a cotton swab and gently touched it to the window, but the dots were not coming off -- in fact, after tilting it at various angles, it became obvious that they were actually not on the window, but the sensor face itself!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBxKp0aW-RcrhMz5FH4T8G3cUIy325EKCefr6Ec1BKUFG_FT9hwYYfzzy03ubbgC3MSo36g9wTTCixSv5TkNWYRl25fGxjqqB8jcQEFVuarU8_w_my3P2BFgg3q1YJKc2hhtmXFtASzbE/s1600/20200105_135704+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBxKp0aW-RcrhMz5FH4T8G3cUIy325EKCefr6Ec1BKUFG_FT9hwYYfzzy03ubbgC3MSo36g9wTTCixSv5TkNWYRl25fGxjqqB8jcQEFVuarU8_w_my3P2BFgg3q1YJKc2hhtmXFtASzbE/s400/20200105_135704+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="353" /></a></div>
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I consulted the manual, and it looks like it's not warranty-voiding to open it up. In fact, there are instructions in the manual on how to do it! So I removed the T-thread ring and the top plate with the window and sure enough, there was something on the sensor, or possibly it had delaminated a bit. I touched it with a clean cotton swab, and it seemed kind of greasy.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4zuuE-zzLj3q_qiHUG7wgnxJwInIq7f-V5UwN5kTFWY6LzeY83V_PARYy13CAZT54S4OXZJ5sIvUAlEY2SDRrTgbUIYO7WUAxnAJGfT4cDcgfamt5MBz_tRui3lkma6Fkxlxc9kGnpLA/s1600/20200105_140540+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4zuuE-zzLj3q_qiHUG7wgnxJwInIq7f-V5UwN5kTFWY6LzeY83V_PARYy13CAZT54S4OXZJ5sIvUAlEY2SDRrTgbUIYO7WUAxnAJGfT4cDcgfamt5MBz_tRui3lkma6Fkxlxc9kGnpLA/s640/20200105_140540+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
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I wondered if some of the sealing grease around the front plate had somehow dripped inside while it was hanging upside-down from the Newtonian. The manual said to clean the sensor with ethanol, so I went down the street to my local hardware store to see if they had some, but apparently it's difficult to come by in California. They said I could maybe try a marine supply store. I went online to see if isopropyl alcohol might work, but lots of people on forums warned that even the 99% variety, which is about the highest purity you can get, still has enough water in it to make streaks on the sensor. Lots of people also recommended this camera sensor cleaner called Eclipse, so I went online to Amazon and ordered that plus some lint-free cotton swabs. So I did what I could with just a cotton swab, which seemed to pick up at least some of it, and then sealed it back up. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJgHWyv6mf2A4qePBTLShOzQeEo_LddNXGIflisS_xxEJVQ-7pSw_Bo7v2sTPHktRGmwykjPXRGaWoeSWnyZBy9VmZ79EsKjuXnLfGKoq4rPRg8TMtDF0QwiDZQP-R8TFOrXSdXrx2bvE/s1600/20200105_144616+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJgHWyv6mf2A4qePBTLShOzQeEo_LddNXGIflisS_xxEJVQ-7pSw_Bo7v2sTPHktRGmwykjPXRGaWoeSWnyZBy9VmZ79EsKjuXnLfGKoq4rPRg8TMtDF0QwiDZQP-R8TFOrXSdXrx2bvE/s640/20200105_144616+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="634" /></a></div>
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<i>It looks like I got most of it off.</i></div>
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For those of you cringing at the thought of opening up your camera -- worry not, I'm a professional! I've worked with some pretty sensitive equipment, being an experimental physicist.</div>
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When you open the sensor area, there are four dessicant tabs that you have to re-charge, since they get exposed to the air and immediately start collecting moisture. The manual said to microwave the tabs for 2 minutes, so I did that. With about 45 seconds left, I smelled something burning...I double-checked the manual, and it said 2 minutes at <i>medium</i> power. Crap! I stopped the microwave with 20 seconds left, and the tabs did look a little toasted. But I put them back in anyway. You have to do this quickly before they start absorbing water. I'll see how things go, and see if I need to order new tabs. If the window starts to dew up, I'll know.</div>
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A new side-project</h3>
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My other afternoon project was getting my color camera, my ZWO ASI294MC Pro, set up with a camera lens. I was going to have to play around a bit with the spacing to see if I could bring it to focus. My first attempt was the camera, then the filter wheel (yes it's a color camera, but it's the easiest way to get my light pollution filter into the optics train, and then it'll be easier to swap my mono camera in and out), then my 70-300mm lens, since it has manual aperture, unlike my other lenses. My other lenses have their irises closed until the camera tells them to open, so I was going to have to use my one manual-aperture lens. </div>
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I set up the contraption on the ZWO camera ring, which has one of those little dovetails that goes onto a camera tripod or ball mount, and put it on my tripod, pointing out the window. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN0-zhPUWlr1XJ0MhuBNZYi977vTcS0RwDHOGy_ZH1qCUyakpzSxdHeLAUObM_E1zAsW10RkFWcPdDCqTNKu_jhOQktP3vKkDJsUh3dd7MrO5EEoQhygwHMkDAM-uGcGgEkWI3wQUyIWA/s1600/2020-01-05+15.35.37.jpg"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN0-zhPUWlr1XJ0MhuBNZYi977vTcS0RwDHOGy_ZH1qCUyakpzSxdHeLAUObM_E1zAsW10RkFWcPdDCqTNKu_jhOQktP3vKkDJsUh3dd7MrO5EEoQhygwHMkDAM-uGcGgEkWI3wQUyIWA/s640/2020-01-05+15.35.37.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
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<i>My cat, Orion, was "helping!"</i></div>
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<i>Optic order: lens, Nikon bayonet-to-T-thread (M42) adapter, Starlight Xpress filter wheel, T-thread ring, then ZWO camera. The clamp is one that ZWO sells specifically for its ASI cameras.</i></div>
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I connected the camera to my tablet and powered it up, and then tried to focus on a power pole on the street behind me. Unfortunately, it did not quite make it. It looked like I needed to have the camera close to the lens for it to focus. I thought I might also try another lens, just to see, even if the aperture was small. I looked at how the aperture opens on the lens -- as it turns out, there's just a little lever that gets moved back and forth. So, I went to my kitchen cupboard and got a toothpick, broke it into pieces, and stuck the pieces into the hole so that the lever was held open. The bayonet adapter had empty space around that part, so even though the toothpick ends stuck up a bit, they didn't hit the adapter. Sweet! That's one problem solved. Now I can use my other lenses.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYb-1c8XMf6iolXLOPSVRHRHDc6dYYky_k_JmTf7DVgvun1JcEDQE3IS2XsrQ4cFKmb4BkwLbPieDFernEUkf_QXQk1d__Hfws9kIDwU-kDY7-QNqNe96o0ARRdW7SdkMgR6x58LpI7as/s1600/2020-01-05+16.00.58+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYb-1c8XMf6iolXLOPSVRHRHDc6dYYky_k_JmTf7DVgvun1JcEDQE3IS2XsrQ4cFKmb4BkwLbPieDFernEUkf_QXQk1d__Hfws9kIDwU-kDY7-QNqNe96o0ARRdW7SdkMgR6x58LpI7as/s640/2020-01-05+16.00.58+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
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<i>Using toothpicks to hold the aperture open on my Nikon 50-200mm lens.</i></div>
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In order to get the camera closer to the lens, I needed to get creative with adapters. In the manual and in some posts on the ZWO Facebook group, I saw that people attached the filter wheel directly to the camera, without using the T-thread ring. But that ring also flips polarity -- the camera, without it, has a male T-thread connection. This meant I needed a female connector on my filter wheel instead of the male one that was there. Luckily, Starlight Xpress sells a variety of different connectors, and they come off with just two outside-accessible screws. So for $30 on Oceanside Photo & Telescope's site, I got a female connector for it. Woot! Should be coming soon.</div>
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To get an idea of the spacing, I took out the filter wheel, and just held the camera so that I could make sure that I could get close enough just by removing the ring. It only needed to be a few millimeters closer to achieve focus at infinity, woo hoo! So this should work. Can't wait!</div>
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<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Nighttime imaging</h3>
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Night fell, and it was crystal clear! Tomorrow night looks good too. The Moon was waxing gibbous, so I put the ZWO ASI1600MM Pro mono camera on my Takahashi refractor with my hydrogen alpha filter. Yes, the moon reflects the Sun's H-alpha light too, but as long as you stay about 40 degrees away or so (depending on phase), you can still get a low enough background to image. On tonight's menu of photons for the camera to chomp on was the Pacman Nebula, Flaming Star Nebula, Cone Nebula, and Medusa Nebula. Thanks to meridian flipping now working, this list takes me through to 3 AM, woot! After that, the only targets up are the little itty bitty galaxies of the upcoming springtime Galaxy Season, which are too small for my 106mm, f/5 refractor. Once the Moon goes back down, I'll probably go ahead and swap out for my 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain to start bagging the bitty bois.</div>
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Since the Moon was up, I went ahead and grabbed a video of it before it was astro-dark. I wanted to process it right away, so I tried to drop it into OneDrive and have it sync across my wifi, but it just said "sync pending" for forever, so I paused the sequence, unplugged the focuser (I needed a USB port, and it was the easiest to re-connect to), plugged my USB 3.0 flash drive in, and waited about 5 minutes for it to transfer. I processed it, and it's not too shabby!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcRi1R49E_rYJDNFLsaWCKPyykSWUERK8_p-87xBpmn95rPJSFwyctoRxq1wCsxjgli-5-PGhAIeZ_zuIHS2z_DPo-X5StGX3Fb0Rh6hUw-SWy3wC4KAnmPRYxfpU5CFt4HavGUI9pEu0/s1600/moon_36_1_1_1+%2528wm%2529.jpg"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcRi1R49E_rYJDNFLsaWCKPyykSWUERK8_p-87xBpmn95rPJSFwyctoRxq1wCsxjgli-5-PGhAIeZ_zuIHS2z_DPo-X5StGX3Fb0Rh6hUw-SWy3wC4KAnmPRYxfpU5CFt4HavGUI9pEu0/s640/moon_36_1_1_1+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Honestly, it's gorgeous. Just sayin'. :D</i></div>
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The sequence ran smoothly, and the images came out beautifully. I didn't see any sign of the residue on the subframes. When I checked on them in the morning, the stars were a little elongated in many of the frames. Maybe there is some cable-tug? I also took a new set of flats in the morning for putting the camera back on. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsUmAXsXES_hygperU9ZipOJ1SOVXDwQioppYTWXe4cU68N14_5qSAZ1f91RZKs-mTRgXnxPEhnCFAbvprIqfP8cJMyLEZ3cx5UhbTfA7k252J7nBETjEjB_z8O1SceQvofsLIIYbsfhY/s1600/flaming+star.jpg"><img border="0" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsUmAXsXES_hygperU9ZipOJ1SOVXDwQioppYTWXe4cU68N14_5qSAZ1f91RZKs-mTRgXnxPEhnCFAbvprIqfP8cJMyLEZ3cx5UhbTfA7k252J7nBETjEjB_z8O1SceQvofsLIIYbsfhY/s640/flaming+star.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>10-minute H-alpha subframe on the Flaming Star Nebula</i></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/272-monday-january-6-2020-errors-errors.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #272 - Monday, January 6, 2020 - Errors, Errors Er'ywhere</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/270-saturday-january-4-2020.html">Previous post: #270 - Saturday, January 4, 2020</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-53877541677712323512020-01-05T15:21:00.000-08:002020-02-09T16:26:36.816-08:00#270 - Saturday, January 4, 2020On Friday night, I didn't set up imaging because the forecast called for rain in the morning, but I did spend a little time in the evening hunting down the meridian flip problem. I did some Googling, and one forum post said that you need to change the hour angle setting in TheSkyX to be 0 in the BisqueTCS settings, which has to do with the angle that the mount will flip itself at. So I did that, and tested it on a star that was about to cross the meridian, and Sequence Generator Pro was able to issue the flip command, and it worked! So hopefully that's the end of that problem. Most of the other posts I came across were from 2016 and 2017 before some changes were made in the TSX driver and in SGP.<br />
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Tonight, it won't be properly clear until after 1 AM according to the forecast, but it was clear enough to get started around 6:45 PM. There was a ring around the Moon, but at least I could get things rolling.<br />
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After getting the Paramount setup and rolling, I went over to my Celestron AVX with my 8-inch Vixen f/4 Newtonian on it. My plan was to align and polar align the mount with that scope, since it would be more accurate, and then swap it out for either the Soviet Maksutov-Cassegrain camera lens I have, or one of my Nikon camera lenses, attached to my ZWO ASI294MC Pro. I finished aligning the AVX, and was about to polar align using Hamal, but it was too close to the meridian, and the dec axis slipped out a bit, causing the gears to do the crazy, loud back-and-forth motion they sometimes do for various reasons. So I had to shut off and reboot the mount, and after re-aligning, I used Rigel instead for polar alignment, since it was too cloudy to use a more well-placed but dimmer star. It's best to use a star near 0 declination and near the meridian for doing Celestron's All-Star polar alignment.<br />
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Once that was all done, I parked and hibernated the mount, and covered it back up and took darks. I'll work on getting either one of the camera lenses set up tomorrow or Monday. I might do the Russian lens, but I also really want to do a wider FOV camera lens and try for getting the deep red H-alpha signal of Barnard's Loop and the Orion constellation area, with my color camera and light pollution filter. We shall see!<br />
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Around 7:40 PM, I finally went inside to make dinner. The clouds had cleared out, the ring around the Moon was gone, and the M45 area was pretty clear, which is where my sequence was at.<br />
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I checked in on my computer from my phone (using TeamViewer) around 10:30 PM and saw that the sequence was in recovery mode and the plate solve image was blank. Huh? Why was it blank? Also, why was it plate solving right now? PHD's guide camera view showed a white image too, like a thick cloud. So I went outside to see if it was pointing somewhere weird or if it had clouded over, but no, it was clear as a bell outside! I opened the folder where my images were saved, and the last one was captured at 9:50. Oof. I don't know what the heck happened. Maybe a freak cloud rolled through? But then the sequence finally recovered on its own and continued imaging.<br />
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I checked again at 11:25 PM, and the meridian flip on the Orion-area nebula M78 at 11 PM was successful! It was happily snapping away. It looked like PHD was guiding fine too, so the calibration coordinates must have been flipped like they were supposed to. Woot! Glad I finally got that issue fixed.<br />
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Checking on things in the morning, I only got a couple frames on the Cone Nebula, although I'm not sure why. I got quite a few on M45, the Pleaides Cluster, but it looks like some thin clouds might have drifted through. I got a fair few shots of M78 and the Medusa Nebula, and a whopping 30 frames on the Whale Galaxy!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAbEUsl46mDFmCpwldEjfaO-DBoQ8DTlv2TZ-k3qwJUnphQztfODm5FwpJToGeOwtFvl_XO7vRKo9ADB6Zfqq9zTWu50ma1xpRLxTRGktyNx6bSkwCzje0oLAEwRJXqZbJi2hNYduAHyM/s1600/m78.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAbEUsl46mDFmCpwldEjfaO-DBoQ8DTlv2TZ-k3qwJUnphQztfODm5FwpJToGeOwtFvl_XO7vRKo9ADB6Zfqq9zTWu50ma1xpRLxTRGktyNx6bSkwCzje0oLAEwRJXqZbJi2hNYduAHyM/s640/m78.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>5-minute color frame on nebula M78 from my Takahashi refractor</i></div>
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<i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxC4_IZlrlvpvtFcQ0rBTEGGboJJndg8q4oeWTRk5-W0_E9biY_-v3FvPcflisrPYZW6olmo44XnA8dTV4lAJMIXz-v4eAd_AE5dRNWQWf576mhblem8M7ljyv4GbMVO8hroa4iI9Y3Vw/s1600/m45.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxC4_IZlrlvpvtFcQ0rBTEGGboJJndg8q4oeWTRk5-W0_E9biY_-v3FvPcflisrPYZW6olmo44XnA8dTV4lAJMIXz-v4eAd_AE5dRNWQWf576mhblem8M7ljyv4GbMVO8hroa4iI9Y3Vw/s640/m45.jpg" width="640" /></a></i></div>
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<i>5-minute color frame on M45, the Pleaides Cluster</i></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/271-sunday-january-5-2020-new-kind-of.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #271 - Sunday, January 5, 2020 - A New Kind of Problem</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/269-thursday-january-2-2020-little.html">Previous post: #269 - Thursday, January 2, 2020 - A Little Visual Observing</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-45839560110843189212020-01-03T14:39:00.000-08:002020-02-09T15:23:54.524-08:00#269 - Thursday, January 2, 2020 - A Little Visual ObservingThe forecast looked like it would be intermittently clear with only a few clouds, according to my new favorite astro forecast app <a href="https://www.astrospheric.com/?Latitude=40.4488073&Longitude=-111.7609548">Astropheric</a> (they have an Android app too, not sure about iOS), so I decided to go ahead and image, because why not!<br />
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I successfully imported the panorama I took yesterday into SkySafari!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivLz6Gs1LhrM-EcnnpC3FJD4HiTWQVMv07hT7uXSmIMRzyoPTc9iSQxM-CKBTo6zMPIIQ5X4AnEYxOfCiLWzcX5sPiO00p5kv53ZcM9yC9nawOb05_Q4BuhMDMJgaqP4Gun0Ri-jJWVnM/s1600/Screenshot_20200209-142121_SkySafari+6+Pro.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivLz6Gs1LhrM-EcnnpC3FJD4HiTWQVMv07hT7uXSmIMRzyoPTc9iSQxM-CKBTo6zMPIIQ5X4AnEYxOfCiLWzcX5sPiO00p5kv53ZcM9yC9nawOb05_Q4BuhMDMJgaqP4Gun0Ri-jJWVnM/s640/Screenshot_20200209-142121_SkySafari+6+Pro.jpg" width="304" /></a></div>
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I tried bringing it into TheSkyX as well, but the settings only allow you to have the top of the picture be 45 degrees high, and I, unfortunately, have obstructions taller than that, like 60 degrees. So I'll just have to use SkySafari to know in advance of slewing whether something is visible.</div>
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I got the sequence rolling with my ZWO ASI294MC Pro color camera on my Takahashi FSQ-106N refractor on my Paramount MyT, and then I headed inside. Watching from my computer indoors, the guide camera was still able to see guide stars, and the guiding actually looked pretty decent. No errors yet from Sequence Generator Pro. </div>
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I went outside later to see how the sky looked, and it was quite nice, actually! There were some thin clouds toward the east but low in the sky, and low in the south as well, but up above about 45 degrees it looked very nice indeed, and the seeing appeared steady. It was so nice that I even went back inside and grabbed my little Meade 10x42 binoculars. I observed:</div>
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- M42 Orion Nebula, which was a fuzzy patch with a couple distinct stars</div>
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- M45 Pleiades cluster, which looked very nice, of course</div>
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- Tried for the Beehive Cluster, but had a hard time finding it; perhaps a bit small for my binoculars, and the clouds were a little thicker where it was at</div>
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- Double Cluster, which took a bit to spot, but I could see two speckly fuzzy lumps</div>
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- M31 Andromeda Galaxy, which was a faint fuzzball but it was there</div>
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- I also caught the Hyades Cluster on my way to looking for the Double Cluster</div>
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While I was hanging around outside, I looked over at my covered-up AVX and thought about what to do with it while I worked on figuring out how to collimate the Newtonian that was on there. I thought, "I don't have any more telescopes to put on there!" But then I thought that I could go ahead and do an experiment I've been wanting to do -- put one of my Nikon lenses on my ZWO ASI294MC Pro, since I got the Nikon bayonet adapter a little while ago. But then, when I was inside looking for the binoculars, I saw the wooden box that contains a Soviet 1000mm Maksutov-Cassegrain camera lens that my astro-buddy John gave me back in August. I still need to play around with that. Which one should I do first?? I thought about it as I headed to bed at 11 PM.</div>
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Before I went to sleep, I checked on how things went. It failed to meridian flip for M78 -- why?? I scrolled through the logfile, and <i>finally</i> found it -- it says it sent the command to go to the east side of the pier (for facing west), but that the mount reported that it was already on the east side. Until I could figure out what was up with that, I went ahead and changed the end times of the rest of my targets to be their transit time so that it wouldn't meridian flip, and would instead just move on to the next target. But then an idea occurred to me -- the next target would be transitting at 12:07 AM, and it was 12:05 AM, so I could watch it! So I changed the target end time to 12:30 AM and watched it do the flip. It failed at the first step -- actually flipping -- which means that it wasn't an issue with re-starting guiding, flipping the guide calibration, plate solving, running the focuser, etc. So that must be what's been going on with meridian flipping lately. Maybe TheSkyX is already sending its own flip command? But the mount was still on the west side of the pier (I checked using the Virtual Mount render in TSX). So there must be a comms breakdown somewhere.<br />
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/270-saturday-january-4-2020.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #270 - Saturday, January 4, 2020</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/268-wednesday-january-1-2020-happy-new.html">Previous post: #268 - Wednesday, January 1, 2020 - Happy New Year!</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-19750234123170957232020-01-02T14:12:00.000-08:002020-02-09T14:39:58.353-08:00#268 - Wednesday, January 1, 2020 - Happy New Year!Happy New Year all!<br />
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The skies weren't that great tonight, but there was a chance of them clearing out in the morning hours, so I ran anyway. I ran my Paramount MyT with the Takahashi FSQ-106N refractor, and my color astro camera, the ZWO ASI294MC Pro. Not much to report on tonight; I set it up and went to bed.<br />
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In the morning, I checked on how it went -- not good. It aborted after M45, which is early in the sequence, so I didn't get any M78 frames :( I ended up having to trash nearly all of the M45 ones anyway, and I only got to keep six -- 3x60s and 3x300s.<br />
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Hope you have 2020 telescope vision in 2020!<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiACU71a-FTzcv0OzFl7hbzOgxzMaSBHCMErY6hyphenhyphenD61IfqMSLcPxEJUPPMtNNxJWKViWP3J6v6OJjWoFjju9Fr0iUNdIPiD-5UOMZD4Een_zWMBWqUT-JGOzYyMrhRM9dfVMVj7YkTPszU/s1600/happynewyear-4768119_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiACU71a-FTzcv0OzFl7hbzOgxzMaSBHCMErY6hyphenhyphenD61IfqMSLcPxEJUPPMtNNxJWKViWP3J6v6OJjWoFjju9Fr0iUNdIPiD-5UOMZD4Een_zWMBWqUT-JGOzYyMrhRM9dfVMVj7YkTPszU/s640/happynewyear-4768119_1280.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
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<i>Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/Syaibatulhamdi-13452116">Syaibatul Hamdi</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/">Pixabay</a></i></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/269-thursday-january-2-2020-little.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #269 - Thursday, January 2, 2020 - A Little Visual Observing</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/267-tuesday-december-31-2019-2017-comet.html">Previous post: #267 - Tuesday, December 31, 2019 - A 2017 Comet in 2019</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Table of Contents</span></a></div>
AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-79935645752827686482020-01-01T13:43:00.000-08:002020-02-09T14:12:58.208-08:00#267 - Tuesday, December 31, 2019 - A 2017 Comet in 2019The skies were a bit scrummy tonight, but it may be intermittently clearer, so I may as well run anyway and see what I can get. Comet C/2017 T2 PANSTARRS was in a position in the northeast that I could reach with my Paramount, so I figured I'd see what I could get.<br />
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Earlier in the day, I finally did go ahead and swap the positions of my two mounts. It didn't make any sense that the one that didn't handle meridian flips well, and that I wasn't currently using -- my Celestron AVX -- should sit in the spot that can see further west across the meridian and wasn't so close to the tree, while my Paramount, the far more capable mount, was in the less favorable spot. So, yes, I'd have to re-align, but with the sky quality not being great, I didn't mind so much on losing that time.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcV4aOHkIVavDvclUp5XgxBsVvHgg6vdFVDGuT_9JZRrThibAwDQ76h7c1x4b4boDTbIXtCjFAKKeiPpFAEsrlSWpWFqhMRz_QhOnAQH2UgIp9tRXOlzrNihyIPB8VZmJoFoTzXlcgpwU/s1600/2019-12-31+16.19.17.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcV4aOHkIVavDvclUp5XgxBsVvHgg6vdFVDGuT_9JZRrThibAwDQ76h7c1x4b4boDTbIXtCjFAKKeiPpFAEsrlSWpWFqhMRz_QhOnAQH2UgIp9tRXOlzrNihyIPB8VZmJoFoTzXlcgpwU/s640/2019-12-31+16.19.17.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Left: Paramount MyT mount, Takahashi FSQ-106N refractor, ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera</i></div>
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<i>Right: Celestron Advanced VX mount, Vixen MyStar G-R 200SS 8-inch, f/4 Newtonian, ZWO ASI1600MM Pro camera</i></div>
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Over the last several nights, I've been hearing lots of scuffling sounds coming from inside my lemon tree, and I wasn't sure what type of critter it was. But I finally got my flashlight on one -- and it was a mouse! So that's what's been eating up all of my lemon rinds.<br />
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The clouds thinned and thickened, and a lovely crescent moon hung in the sky. I had to restart the sequence twice myself because, despite the recovery options I have enabled to "try every 10 minutes for 10 hours," it still just gives up one the guide star is lost for like 30 seconds. Sheesh.<br />
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Since it was New Year's Eve, I stayed up until midnight to ring in the new year, with a lap full of cat. They were both cozily asleep, but they woke up pretty quickly once the fireworks from the various displays around the area started going off. (We've been getting enough rain lately that the fire risk is low now, I guess).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKJSUghIWJuNskVg6PTplWwNQ2NXcO4-ocgq1jCoijfQXX9o0kz84YIdROMQYfVg1FR_9FMh0wZo39FFV18sler94O0fVkrL4Y-ZfF6b6Sz9yKAK6Xc3PEnXOtzotMuFKwm8N30EigDrg/s1600/2019-12-31+19.23.58+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKJSUghIWJuNskVg6PTplWwNQ2NXcO4-ocgq1jCoijfQXX9o0kz84YIdROMQYfVg1FR_9FMh0wZo39FFV18sler94O0fVkrL4Y-ZfF6b6Sz9yKAK6Xc3PEnXOtzotMuFKwm8N30EigDrg/s640/2019-12-31+19.23.58+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
<i>Orion is on the left, and Nova in the middle.</i><br />
<i>Also pictured: my sweet new space-themed housecoat</i></div>
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On the target list were the comet, M45 Pleaides Cluster (maybe, if the small window of time between the comet and the next target was big enough), M78 nebula in Orion, Cone Nebula, Medusa Nebula, the Beehive Cluster (to fill a gap of time -- I don't typically get much good out of open clusters), and then the Whale Galaxy early in the morning.<br />
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Earlier in the day, I went outside and took a panorama of my backyard using the ultra-wide camera on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, which made it a lot easier in my tight backyard. It took a couple of tries to get a decent one, and then I brought it into Photoshop to make the sky transparent, and cropped and slid the image around (you can have an image wrap around the other side of the canvas in Photoshop, thank goodness) to meet the specifications for importing it into SkySafari. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while -- I can add this panorama in SkySafari to the sky chart so that I have a better idea of when a target is going to dip behind my lemon tree, house, etc. I can also bring it into TheSkyX's chart.<br />
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I checked on how things went in the morning, and the sequence did complete, finally! That was exciting. I got several good shots of the Beehive Cluster, a fair number on the Cone Nebula, Medusa Nebula, and M78, and only two on M45 due to clouds. Only a few of the comet shots came out as well. However, tracking was rock-solid all night! It was so solid that I might need to start actually dithering here soon. I haven't needed to dither in the past because there's been enough drift and random motion between frames to not need it, but eventually I'll get my rig optimized well enough that it actually stays solidly on target.<br />
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I spent the (late) morning of the next day processing the image. I only wound up with six 3-minute frames, so I didn't even bother trying to do the dual still-comet, still-stars image -- I just did a still-comet image. PixInsight has a tool called <i>CometAlignment</i> that is really great -- you import all your frames, it time-sorts them, and then you select the comet nucleus in the first and last frames, and it figures out the position in all the frames in between. Then I just stacked those (with no pixel rejection, otherwise the stars would mostly disappear), and tried to clean it up and make it presentable. It was extremely noisy (using a color camera with a light of light pollution often is!), but still, it's a comet, which is always cool!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxwD3SVT8MSQMgLE-VAgzeRECJIxX1FfrdXo20AdsjmBliTiwuTZK6JBp0JF90ozkgYwyXHH4cAAlqC_SaUX6ZmD9WlM734vvBXNHDCpRYGPVrA7leFO30-1fdGlqKDue58b-d1CUWUvw/s1600/c-2017-T2-Panstarrs_1_1_1+%2528wm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="566" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxwD3SVT8MSQMgLE-VAgzeRECJIxX1FfrdXo20AdsjmBliTiwuTZK6JBp0JF90ozkgYwyXHH4cAAlqC_SaUX6ZmD9WlM734vvBXNHDCpRYGPVrA7leFO30-1fdGlqKDue58b-d1CUWUvw/s640/c-2017-T2-Panstarrs_1_1_1+%2528wm%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Date: 31 December 2019</i></div>
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<i>Location: East Bay area, CA</i></div>
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<i>Object: Comet C/2017 T2 (PANSTARRS)</i></div>
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<i>Attempt: 1</i></div>
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<i>Camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro</i></div>
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<i>Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106N</i></div>
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<i>Accessories: Astronomik CLS-CCD 2-inch filter</i></div>
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<i>Mount: Paramount MyT</i></div>
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<i>Guide scope: Orion 50mm mini-guider</i></div>
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<i>Guide camera: QHY5</i></div>
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<i>Subframes: 6x180s (18m)</i></div>
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<i>Gain/ISO: 120</i></div>
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<i>Acquisition method: Sequence Generator Pro</i></div>
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<i>Stacking program: PixInsight 1.8.8</i></div>
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<i>Post-Processing program: PixInsight 1.8.8</i></div>
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<i>Darks: 20</i></div>
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<i>Biases: 0</i></div>
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<i>Flats: 50</i></div>
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<i>Temperature: -20C</i><br />
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/268-wednesday-january-1-2020-happy-new.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #268 - Wednesday, January 1, 2020 - Happy New Year!</span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/01/266-monday-december-30-2019.html">Previous post: #266 - Monday, December 30, 2019</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2017/07/table-of-contents.html">Table of Contents</a></span></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-37185510498612025292019-12-31T21:49:00.000-08:002020-02-09T13:44:41.043-08:00#266 - Monday, December 30, 2019I disassembled my rigs before I went home for Christmas and brought them inside to keep them safe since I would be out of town for a week, so I spent the day re-assembling them. I had left the tripods set up outside though (covered in the scope covers), so it was easier to get everything back up and running since the alignment models should still be quite close.<br />
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To better balance my Newtonian on my Celestron AVX mount, I took the opportunity of having everything taken apart to swap out the dovetail for a longer Vixen one that I had around. This also allowed me to swap out the wooden bar that I had my finderscope and guide scope for the metal one that was previously the dovetail that I used to attach it to the mount, so that should be a little more stable. It's hard to tell whether the AVX is properly balanced, however, because the axes are so tight. But I gave it my best guess.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqc0YzUVSMueBbRE7zSinFMzgPWqcbK-FGpus0sNkPA-i-S4BiLiYjFBrRhjIr3HlDKUZi-DGyozZSCD5okznuDQJFkqfq8zf3apIv_ywWwrF1tVif83vyfrttT0nsxFW6hMg04clzAI/s1600/2019-12-30+15.05.48+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoqc0YzUVSMueBbRE7zSinFMzgPWqcbK-FGpus0sNkPA-i-S4BiLiYjFBrRhjIr3HlDKUZi-DGyozZSCD5okznuDQJFkqfq8zf3apIv_ywWwrF1tVif83vyfrttT0nsxFW6hMg04clzAI/s640/2019-12-30+15.05.48+%2528no+GPS%2529.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
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<i>One of my cats, Nova, was "helping"</i></div>
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After sunset, I went out and ran re-calibration of the T-Point model on the Paramount, and also ran the Accurate Polar Alignment routine, using the star Hamal. It was already quite close, woo hoo!<br />
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Once the T-Point model was done running, it was nearly astro-dark, and I stood outside for a bit, admiring the sky. The constellation Orion shined brightly overhead, Sirius burned bright but low on the sky, while the stars of the Pleaides Cluster sparkled up high. I looked at orange Betelgeuse -- did it look dimmer? There's been news circulating that it's been dimming more than usual.<br />
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Once the Paramount was off and rolling with my Takahashi FSQ-106N refractor and ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera (with a light pollution filter, the Astronomik CLS-CCD), I went inside to make some dinner. You know, I've been at this hobby for about four and a half years, and it's still as thrilling as it was in the early days when everything is ready to roll and the images start capturing. It's just so exciting!<br />
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After dinner, I went out to try to collimate my 8-inch Vixen f/4 Newtonian using SharpCap's experimental collimation assistant tool. I couldn't get the calculated field lines to stay on though, and I wasn't sure which bolt I needed to move which way, and my brother-in-law texted me back about playing some Borderlands 3 together tonight. So I put the cover back on that one and just rolled with the Paramount. There are so many degrees of freedom in collimating a Newt! I need some expertise to help me out.<br />
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I watched the sequence from inside before going to bed, and a tree blocked the guide scope while it was on the Cone Nebula before that part of the sequence finished, so I bumped up the time to slew to the next target, the Medusa Nebula. Rawr. Maybe I should swap places with my other mount...<br />
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Since I wasn't imaging on the Newtonian, I went ahead and set up my other camera, the ZWO ASI1600MM Pro, to take darks using my other laptop. I played some Borderlands 3 with my bro-in-law, checked on the scope and how the darks were going, and then finally went to sleep at 12:45 AM...so nice to not have classes for a minute :) I still have studying to do for my prelim exams, but I could sleep in once in a while.<br />
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When I checked on things in the morning, the sequence had stopped running on the Paramount after the Medusa Nebula. The log button (the simplified log, showing errors and warnings) has disappeared in the new version of Sequence Generator Pro, so I opened up the actual log file, but it was so verbose that I couldn't really tell where the actual failure was after scrolling backwards for a while. Dang it!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfR4lW6Sxcv-x99JAUPmgYvereFLRP-KfPUkh7H22ONTYvkAEo9bynAIfj8Dz1qYi_i3IP484_AKGmzLeDQg6DCEv5K1tGCOFER6iexe6Le3n2AAOL4MXKupSbD5Rxx5ZQ3SsbPxFfS2k/s1600/30+Dec+medusa+RGB.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfR4lW6Sxcv-x99JAUPmgYvereFLRP-KfPUkh7H22ONTYvkAEo9bynAIfj8Dz1qYi_i3IP484_AKGmzLeDQg6DCEv5K1tGCOFER6iexe6Le3n2AAOL4MXKupSbD5Rxx5ZQ3SsbPxFfS2k/s640/30+Dec+medusa+RGB.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Single 5-minute color subframe on the Medusa Nebula, ZWO ASI294MC Pro, Takahashi FSQ-106N</i></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/02/267-tuesday-december-31-2019-2017-comet.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #267 - Tuesday, December 31, 2019 - A 2017 Comet in 2019</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/01/265-thursday-december-19-2019-star-wars.html">Previous post: #265 - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - Star Wars</a></span></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-43794997882251914832019-12-20T21:18:00.000-08:002020-01-30T21:50:56.031-08:00#265 - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - Star WarsOnce again, the forecast called for cloudy skies, but it ended up clearing up. One of the reasons I love having my scopes set up in the backyard is that I can just run out there with my laptop and get rolling quite quickly. Which is exactly what I did! I went and saw the new Star Wars movie, #9: The Rise of Skywalker with some of my classmates, so I got home a little before 11 PM.<br />
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I had updated Sequence Generator Pro to a new version that came out, and to my delight, the autofocus routine was adjusted to fit a quadratic function rather than the intercept of two lines. However, it encountered some Star Wars of its own -- trying to autofocus was <i>not</i> going well. It kept failing to get a good fit, and kept trying and trying and failing and failing, and I couldn't figure out why.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnJoIR_FTrMLxcsblyazMeiHXF8MY09WYSYzgKzomW4U6hwdftDhgsch1OxK0UMgDwMLdP_XGBROmz3IaCSz3gaY8nSJUBsz60_2MRO1o1qdwRP7MAPQPuQi5sVSiqkgP93dhnhP47NqI/s1600/Screenshot+2019-12-19+22.56.23.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnJoIR_FTrMLxcsblyazMeiHXF8MY09WYSYzgKzomW4U6hwdftDhgsch1OxK0UMgDwMLdP_XGBROmz3IaCSz3gaY8nSJUBsz60_2MRO1o1qdwRP7MAPQPuQi5sVSiqkgP93dhnhP47NqI/s640/Screenshot+2019-12-19+22.56.23.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>It would look good, and then...</i></div>
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<i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf7XPR04Kqd4uFdxelqQBG2Ye4ZB0j3AfcwTUQqUat1Ki0LWnRUREdB2QCwVqZveNbo-lxXGx9LSljHhpzuna2KEgmdrCTE1mYSvQES44TWLO8czD0cEs4XcxX2wSJ3XO8EbRURI9Wt6U/s1600/Screenshot+2019-12-19+22.57.04.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf7XPR04Kqd4uFdxelqQBG2Ye4ZB0j3AfcwTUQqUat1Ki0LWnRUREdB2QCwVqZveNbo-lxXGx9LSljHhpzuna2KEgmdrCTE1mYSvQES44TWLO8czD0cEs4XcxX2wSJ3XO8EbRURI9Wt6U/s640/Screenshot+2019-12-19+22.57.04.png" width="640" /></a></i></div>
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After enough failures, I just turned off the autofocus routine and hoped for the best. If the temperature stayed about the same the rest of the night, it should be fine.</div>
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Then, SGP started freezing up, and then my entire machine, so I had to go out there to see what was up. Task Manager showed that a "System Interrupt Process" and OneDrive were eating up all my CPU, so I force quit everything and started over. My last Microsoft Surface 3 tablet worked really well, but my new (refurbished) one after busting the screen on my last one, despite having the same specs, has some issues with CPU and disk usage sometimes. Sigh.</div>
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I was finally imaging again by 11:40 PM, and I had to get to bed. My Quantum Mechanics class oral final was in the morning, and I should get some sleep.<br />
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/01/266-monday-december-30-2019.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #266 - Monday, December 30, 2019</span></a></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/01/264-monday-december-16-2019.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Previous post: #264 - Monday, December 16, 2019</span></a></div>
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-33916030186728610362019-12-17T21:14:00.000-08:002020-01-30T21:50:14.847-08:00#264 - Monday, December 16, 2019Despite my complaining on Saturday, I got a third night in a row! Woo hoo! Another defiance of the forecast. I once again had my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro and H-alpha filter on my Takahashi FSQ-106N refractor loaded onto my Paramount MyT. The sequence was still the same as the last few nights: California, Cone, and Medusa Nebulae.<br />
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I got home around 8:30 PM after spending all day on my 24-hour take-home Electricity & Magnetism final exam, so the sequence didn't start until well after dark, unfortunately. It was likely going to cloud out later, although I figured I would try and get as many frames as I could before then -- it doesn't cost me anything, I get to just set it up and go to bed! If it clouds out, the scope will try for a while, and then go park itself.<br />
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I did manage to get a few Cone Nebula 10-minute exposures, and all of my California Nebula shots came out really great -- nice round stars. Clouds did indeed roll in before the Medusa Nebula ran though, so I yet again didn't get any on it. Sometime, I will!!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6CWlD2tuJIUL7LhcbEKGyQ-Bkvbktykm5pKfa8_53z6BFegQ3mTh2so3CsO7eT79MTDTNZDpZ5eY2diEriRzD9vPlIgbBsKkUQzOVHtlJIHSw_y-Q5gndH57_hw4J22zsBwkWxdJvEg/s1600/16+Dec+California.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="486" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd6CWlD2tuJIUL7LhcbEKGyQ-Bkvbktykm5pKfa8_53z6BFegQ3mTh2so3CsO7eT79MTDTNZDpZ5eY2diEriRzD9vPlIgbBsKkUQzOVHtlJIHSw_y-Q5gndH57_hw4J22zsBwkWxdJvEg/s640/16+Dec+California.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>California Nebula, single 5-minute frame, ZWO ASI1600MM Pro, H-alpha filter, Takahashi FSQ-106N</i></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/01/265-thursday-december-19-2019-star-wars.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #265 - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - Star Wars</span></a><br />
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AstronoMollyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04340696241101171173noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-451409326012986774.post-12144109411817715892019-12-16T21:07:00.000-08:002020-01-30T21:14:54.409-08:00#263 - Sunday, December 15, 2019 - Surprise!The forecast promised clouds, but much to my delight, it cleared out! I set up at 5:15 PM, well before dark-out, and went inside to eat dinner and participate in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiR5AmROq4YcXF8hCxxZQ-g">TAIC</a> call. I set the first target to start at dark-out.<br />
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During the TAIC call, I remoted into my tablet from my desktop to see how things were going -- and it got started with no problems! It was happily snapping up photons from outer space without my intervention. I feel like a proud mama :D<br />
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I read the Robofocus manual and started working on training the temperature compensation. It would be difficult because the temperature was pretty stable, but I figured I could get at least a couple points tonight.<br />
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Tonight's targets are another round on the California, Cone, and Medusa Nebulae, until 2 AM. Soon enough, it'll be time to put one of my Schmidt-Cassegrains on for the longer focal length to properly capture those itty bitty galaxies. I might put my 8-inch on instead of my 11-inch, since my 8-inch has very little mirror flop and has never lost collimation, while my 11-inch has some significant mirror flop. Unless I get a focuser soonish, which would help compensate for the mirror flop issue. We'll see.<br />
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By the morning, I got several 10-minute H-alpha frames on the California Nebula and Cone Nebula, but none of my Medusa Nebula frames came out -- the tracking was, once again, not great, which may have been due to clouds.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjripAyMjR23zF0cDpdbn7yqk-s-xuFhUAHSCta9_ubMfccmxh1VTSaMj__ISSsHqjvg7l617LrBBV_4Li5pjbL9iYEM1SB7m3zG5XNbzmM6WXhd-T8nV0yBbvCHwuzH0bsn2ingAt8yI/s1600/cone%252C+8+Dec%252C+elongated+stars.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="486" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjripAyMjR23zF0cDpdbn7yqk-s-xuFhUAHSCta9_ubMfccmxh1VTSaMj__ISSsHqjvg7l617LrBBV_4Li5pjbL9iYEM1SB7m3zG5XNbzmM6WXhd-T8nV0yBbvCHwuzH0bsn2ingAt8yI/s640/cone%252C+8+Dec%252C+elongated+stars.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Not the most contrast, but not terrible...</i></div>
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<i>Cone Nebula, single 10-min subframe, ZWO ASI1600MM Pro, H-alpha filter, Takahashi FSQ-106N</i></div>
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<a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/01/264-monday-december-16-2019.html"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Next post: #264 - Monday, December 16, 2019</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://astronomollylog.blogspot.com/2020/01/262-saturday-december-14-2019-rain-rain.html">Previous post: #262 - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - Rain Rain Go Away</a></span></div>
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