Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

The winter was particularly hard on the Torus scope, as a mouse like critter got into the scope and chewed through wires.
When the telescope was first fired up this spring, it was unresponsive in Right Ascension movement.

This past Saturday was a repair workshop, and with 4 hours of troubleshooting, repairing and testing, was repaired successfully.

The Allsky1 camera system has been up and running since December 2005… coming up on 10 years!

Last week, we renovated it by removing the 14″ dome, removed the 28watts of heaters, removed the 1watt circulation fan and remounted the camera.
It is supposed to be weatherproof or weather resistant. We shall see.

Some of the issues with the old design were:
flies, bugs and bees were getting inside the dome, sticking to the underside of the dome, pooping on the camera lens and in general were being a real pain.
The heaters took a lot of power and sometimes still did not stop condensation and fogging.
The fan would burn out fairly regularly and make a lot of noise as well.

This is an initial image of the new setup;

After 1 week it seems to be surviving the weather fine. As a bonus the horizon is a little better as is the contrast on the images themselves.
The moon glare is not as bad as it used to be with the big dome overhead.
The camera system itself is probably another 5-10 years old before we got it as a donation.
It currently takes an 80 second exposure and then takes about 10 seconds to download via a large camera controller and a parallel port cable…. wayy before USB.

When it does fail, we will replace it with something a lot newer, better resolution (657×495 currently), maybe even colour to pick up aurora better, faster downloads (so there is not so much down time while downloading images).
It’s primary use is to watch for bolides/fireballs/bright meteors, but its secondary is to show cloud cover for observing and pretty pictures.

First image of Jupiter in the observing run last night. 2015 April 15 at 00:48 UT. Using a 20cm Meade LX200, a ZWO ASI 120MC camera, firecapture software and autostakkert! to process. North is up. The Great Red Spot is just coming on from the left, the speck at the right is Ganymede. Jupiter is getting smaller.. now only 39.7 arc seconds and fainter, approx magnitude -2.2. Exposures were 8ms over the course of 60 seconds and 75% of the best frames were used to stack.

Jupiter 2015 April 08 01:24 UT

Went out last night at 23:30UT and at 01:00 UT April 8th.
I try to file this run as 2015April07
It gets confusing imaging across the UT midnight.

1st time out with the Meade 20cm LX200, with dew heaters but no shield, the ZWO ASI 120MC camera and firecapture software.
At 19:30 it was too bright to do a two star alignment but I manually drove to Jupiter and did one run using the driftscan method of imaging.
It actually worked out not too bad. Seems to have caught the GRS coming on and a moon shadow on the surface of Jupiter.

After 01:00UT it was dark, did a two star alignment on Capella and another star in Auriga (wonky hand controller.. really gotta find out if a replacement can be found). It found Jupiter in a low power eyepiece, syncd on Jupiter and put the camera in. With FL=2000mm, that is twice the magnification of the Meade 10cm FL=1000mm scope, and hence harder to centre Jupiter in the FOV Eventually got it and the focus.

It was cold sitting out in a chair by the scope, so I thought, let’s ramp it up a bit. Hooked the camera and telescope into a USB hub, connected it to the 5m USB repeater that went into the observatory and put the chair inside. It was much warmer there, even with the doors open.
Tracking was not bad but I still wanted some remote control of the scope.
Firecapture has a telescope control option but only for autoguiding.. and I have not come anywhere close to learning about that.
Stellarium.. nope.. finally settled on Handyavi. It also you to slew and to control the microfocuser. Bonus.. it worked!

20cm Meade lx200 FL=2000mm F10
Jupiter altitude 60 degrees, apparent size 40.56″
exposure: 6ms over 53 seconds and using 50% of 5033 frames to create this image.
Jupiter now covers 112 pixels give or take
The Great Red Spot features prominently in the southern equatorial belt. The planet is rotating from left to right. North is up.

Can’t wait to add a new dew shield and better pointing and tracking.
This is the first powerup of the lx200 since the fall.
The neighbours graciously turn ON their two back lights and left them on for the full session.
Damien Peach, astrophotog extraordinare, built a portable “wall” of 2×4’s with black plastic to block local light… sounds like a plan!

Jupiter F10 FL=1000mm

Meade 10cm SC F10 FL=1000mm
best 75% of 8189 frames of 5ms exposures for 60 sec

seeing was average, transparency average
Having the moon in the sky did not seem to affect quality of iamges that much.
There was some haze moving in, in front of the weather front.
Looks like this is the best that a 10cm can do.. time to move on to the next scope.

Jupiter F25 FL=2500mm