The workflow process is slowly changing over time.
Now I tend to do a full view overexposed capture to establish orientation of the moons of Jupiter, to math it up with a naked eye orientation. Io is behind the planet, Europa and Ganymede to the left.
Next I am recording some quantative data about atmospherics… ie temperature, wind speed and direction and the clear sky chart seeing scale.
Temp= -3C
Windspeed 10kph gusting to 20kph from az 270 degrees
clearskychart seeing scale=1/5=bad

Next in the workflow process is a 30 second imaging run with no firecapture autoalignment, then a 30 second imaging run with firecapture autoalignment. This gives me a visual record of the seeing.
Then follows as many 180 second imaging runs as I can do. This particular afternoon, the wind gusts started to move the observatory on the tracks… so I stopped.
Once the files are transferred from the local laptop SSD drive (automatically scheduled), I run them through PIPP to crop and center down to 600×600 pixels, then through Autostakkert!3 to judge quality and stack in 5%, 10%, 25% best ofs. Usually I then run with the best 25% unless the quality scale indicates otherwise. 25% is a nice balance between throwing out the worst 75% of the images yet having enough data signal.noise to get a good final result.
Lastly the image is run through registax wavelet processing for sharpening.

This is the last image of the session, the best 25% of approx 8K frames, coming out of Autostakker.

This is the result after going through registax wavelet processing The results are amazing!
Lastly I run it through some linux scripts that annotate the image with its own filename, and other information.

The declination of Jupiter remains at record lows, but is increasing over the next decade or so. This means Jupiter will rise in altitude, giving better seeing as it goes.

Telescope optics tend to be a finicky and complex issue at times. Mirrors tend to be finished down to fractions of a wavelength of light across the mirror surface to its designed curve.

The vixen VC200L is a 200mm diameter mirror with a focal ratio of 9 meaning it has a focal length of 200*9=1800mm.

Now imagine the sensitivity of a mirror out to a point 1.8m away. The slightest movement of the mirror throws the focus point off by a lot.
Also consider camera pixels, which are on the order of 5 micrometers..
So.. We had a problem. Our imaging of Jupiter was not coming into focus.

35mm film canister

Cheshire collimator
Then we used a cheshire collimator.
It too looked ok but the cheshire was not fixed symmetrically in the focuser when you rotated it 360 degrees around. As a result the optics looked really bad.. but you did not know that for a fact..

Lastly the star test.
We used only the 90deg adapter, no barlow, and the zwo asi224mc and zwo asi290mc cameras.
Wow! The asymmetry jumps out at you:

2021nov27-badcollimation

This is the bright star Vega, inside the focus point. Running it through the focus point and outside the focus point also shows bad collimation.

So we waited until the skies cleared again, determined that the vixen collimation screws/allen screws, used a 2.5mm allen key. We identified the push screws by loosening one and seeing that it was indeed loose. All three push screws were loosened. The camera was fired up and the out of focus start was displayed.
Starting at a standard fixed point, we adjusted the pull screw and the image went out of the field of view. So it was a turn the screw and use the telescope handcontroller to move the scope and keep the image on display. After a few 1/6 turns, we moved to another screw and repeated. It still seemed out a bit so we went to the 3rd push screw and pushed it in a bit.
The star test image looked *much* better:

2021dec03-after collimation

This is Vega inside of focus.
Closer inspection shows the collimation can still be improved just a little bit more… next clear night!

The Jupiter images have not yet been processed but they do look better!

I did a short experiment last night with barlows and focussing distances.

The results baffle me so I am going to have to try it again.

As a general rule of thumb, I had believed that using a focal reducer
would bring the focus point in closer to the telescope and that a
barlow would move the focus point further out from the telescope.

In addition, I believed that the more powerful the barlow, the further
out the focus would be.

So. I have a motorised focuser with a numerical counter. I moved the
focuser all the way in, had a 90 deg diagonal and the zwo asi290mc
camera installed, the following are the results

focuser all the way in to start, position 0
no barlow -23000 to focus – quite a ways out
x1.5 antares barlow +3000 almost all in
x2 antares barlow -15000 maybe 1/3 out
x2.5 televue barlow -4000 maybe 1/4 out
x3 televue barlow +1000 maybe 1/4 out

Note that we started at zero and went negative the further out (that is
just the way the numbers went). So we should not have had any positive
numbers at all.. and yet we did.

How to account for that? slippage in the focuser motor, connection,
etc? It was pretty cold (-4C) and it was moving pretty slow at times.

In addition, the belief that the focuser would move further out with the
power of the barlow turned out to be not so.

I think I will repeat this again. Then also repeat it with the starting
point of the focuser all the way *out*.

In any event, the whole purpose of this was to help with the catch22 of
imaging.. trying to find your out of focus target. you need focus to
see the target but you need the target in order to focus. So I was
going to write these numbers down on the wall and use them to achieve
“close enough” focus in the first step, in aid of finding the target,
then do a fine focus afterward.

Congratulations!

(10062) Kimhay = 1988 RV4 = 1997 UY24

Discovered at La Silla on 1988-09-01 by H. Debehogne.

(10062) Kimhay

Kimberley Dawn Hay (b. 1959) is an enthusiastic observer, sunspot and meteor recorder, and sketch artist, who has contributed to the American Meteor Society, AAVSO, American Lunar and Planetary Observers, and the RASC. She has won the RASC Service Award and the RASC Chilton Prize. [Ref: WGSBN Bull. 1, #11, 5]

https://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=10062

https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=10062