Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

Another attempted Jupiter imaging session Wednesday evening.. I know I know, up against “Survivor!”

There was high passing cloud that “Clear Outside” said was 2%. Ha! It sure was lit up by the sun and again, the autoguide lost track of Jupiter with the lit up passing clouds. I started imaging at 19:30 EDT (sun was still up). The first two runs went ok, then all the rest until 20:04 had to be thrown out. I continued until 20:40 when a bad refocus attempt lost Jupiter, lost autoguiding, and it was time to close down and have a nightcap.

This was the best of the evening, and yes that is the Great Red Spot coming into view… pretty bad all in all.

I had to give up the RGB autobalance until at least 20:20 EDT as the sky was so bright blue that any autocorrection heavily skewed it into the orange again. Pointing and tracking are a little better after a realignment earlier in the week.

Looking forward to this evening. Two competing forecasts.. will see which is correct!

Finally! Success! After three years + I have finally gotten an autoguiding system to work.
Wow. This is going to be a game changer.

In the past, because of the very high magnification used in planetary imaging, and even just seeing alone, much less bad tracking or pointing, meant that one had to manually guide the scope to keep Jupiter in the Region of Interest field of view. Typically Jupiter is around 45 arc seconds large and I generally shoot an ROI around 60-70 arcseconds.

I would have to touch the manual tracking every 30-60 seconds or so or risk it touching an edge, ruining the entire run.
And don’t even wanna to talk about bathroom runs!

So the autoimaging run would be set up for say 20-30 runs in a row and in the early days I would sit outside with the hand paddle that never wants to work well, less so in the cold.

For maybe a year I have been inside, remote controlling and it is much nicer, warmer, but introduced a few of its own quirks.

Last night I got the complete system up and running correctly.
ascom platform drivers for the lx200gps on the windows 10 laptop
firecapture telescope control initializing correctly.
tracking configuration set correctly (the last piece fell into place when I realized that I flip the x and y axes for imaging (north at top) but I had to tell the guiding control that as well. The last 5 attempts had it correctly in the negative direction, loosing Jupiter completely in 5-10 seconds. I thought it was just broken.

So the biggest thing coming will be much longer sequences of runs, instead of only maybe 20 runs covering 40 minutes, with autoguiding I should be able to ramp that up into the 100-200 region, covering 400 minutes.. maybe 6 hours!?

drive space now becomes the limiting factor… have to start working on managing that better… or buy a bigger SSD (240GB now).

In any event, long post.. here is some eye candy… seeing and transparency were poor, pretty much full moon above the horizon, focus was difficult, not much to see.

Wednesday evening showed a two day shy full moon lighting up the sky, but with Jupiter a fair ways up the sky.
Always a good time to practice practice practice, the processes and procedures for imaging and trying to incrementally make them better.
This imaging session showed that somehow, for the first time, the power had not been shut off to the telescope. It had been parked and beeped confirmation.. I am pretty sure. But the scope was not in the park position, rather slightly down and west of where it should have been, three days ago. The dew shield had come off, which suggests a lot of movement, but there was no cable wrap at all.
Strange. Perhaps the most likely situation is that the power bar switch bounced to off and then to on again.
If the scope had actually parked and the power was continuous, it would/should not have moved.
The fact that it moved suggests the power was off then on again. It may have started tracking after the power up.

In any event, I fired up the firecapture beta and tried out a couple of the new features, but not with a lot of luck.
In the image runs, you can easily see that contrast was a lot worse, from the moon lighting up the sky.

The Great Red Spot is visible, but not much else. Focus was difficult as seeing and transparency was poor.
Just waiting for the moon to get out of the way… perhaps Saturday evening is the next target of opportunity.

Got up a little late on Sunday morning.. it was twilight already and Saturn was just about to go behind some trees. Wow.. the altitude is quite low! Note the scale of this image against Jupiter is the same.
Poor seeing, low altitude makes for very little detail.
Saturn was 23 degrees up off the horizon with an apparent diameter (with rings) of 42 arc seconds.
I will try next time to get it at zenith, which is approx 04:20 EDT

Poor seeing and poor transparency with a 46% full moon less than 1/2 a sky away.
GRS just leaving off the right side. Very smeary, fuzzy. Only did 11 runs and packed it in for the night.
Runs went from 01:08 UT to 01:27 UT

One particularly bad image in the run, not sure why yet.

After a good night of Public Outreach at the Queen’s University Observatory, the skies were still clear allowing for a short stint of imaging Jupiter. It was good to see Susan, Brian, Laurie & Devon in handling 125 people after the talk by Dr. Kristine Spekkens (RMC).

The GRS was not present, transparency was poor, seeing was poor-average.
There were only 7 runs of 90 seconds each. Interestingly, I had varied the exposure quite a lot, from 30ms to 50ms, and yet the processed animated shows an even level of exposure.
One of the processing steps must have standardized the levels. Probably Autostakkert.

Jupiter 20160330 02;22 UT Best ever!

Wow… another clear night Tuesday night.. with no moon rising until after midnight!
So outside to setup and start to image Jupiter from about 21:30-23:30 EDT.
To my surprise, the GRS was traversing across the face! Added bonus!

Minor notes from the night:
– do not attempt to install a new remote desktop client while imaging. Crashed the firecapture app, lost the camera, and had to restart the sequence. This is the 14 minute jump in the sequence of images early on.

– after install chrome remote desktop, I do find it a little better than ultravnc that I had been using.

– Watching two hours of imaging was interesting seeing was poor to average, transparency was average. But then, for about 3 minutes, it went crystal clear. The focus snapped into place like the lens had been fogged all evening prior. and then it got worse.
It took until today to process the 58 runs made (each 90 sec with a 30 sec break, or 2 minutes total cycling time).

– after purchasing a new 240GB SSD to replace the 120GB SSD in the imaging laptop a month or two ago… I still ran out of drive space! 150GB of images from 2 hours alone. I may have to increase the 30 sec break time to 90 sec, just to get a greater overall span to get more Jupiter rotation.
I have a routine (batch file) that i run after the end of the session, which moves all of the images off the laptop and onto another computer. I am reluctant to try to run this while imaging however.. But I may have to…

I continue to be amazed at how a perfectly naked eye visual look at a clear night sky can be horrible for imaging.

Jupiter 20160330 02:18 UT average

Image at 02:18UT was not great. The seeing was average at this time. The moon Io is seen off to the upper left.

The very next image run was 02:22 UT and it was FANTASTIC! The best ever shot of the GRS I have made.
Io snapped into focus and can be easily seen now.
Turbulence can be seen trailing the GRS Wow!
This is the .gif animation running from 01:22 to 03:26 UT