I went out at 04:00 to -18C and a lot of frozen bits. Observatory doors slightly open from windstorm a few days ago, roof slightly pushed a bit and frozen in place.. a bit of banging fixed that. Meade LX200 handpaddle display showing garbage, restarted ok but still very slow to respond, computer not responding all that well, restarted it to, hoping it would not start doing ms updates! and it did not.
Another tip: do not upgrade your image capture software at the start or mid session! Hmm.. thatsounds like familiar advice!
It was clear, cold and a fullish moon still in the sky.
As an experiment, I did not turn on the corrector dew heater until later and when I did, only to 10%. It did not frost over, although the telrad sure did.
After a few rough starts, and that aforementioned software update attempt, I go in 32 runs, most of 120 seconds each. Cloud rudely came blowing in fast and I had to pack it in by 06:00
Tracking was poor, each 120 sec run required manual guiding. Once in awhile a cloud came along and blew out the image autoalignment and we got some edge effects. Mostly those were thrown out but I kept a couple to fill in anyways.
I also took the temperature of the OTA using a CanTire Mastercraft remote temp tool (it shoots a red laser pointer at a target and measures the temp).
Not sure of the accuracy or how well it worked in the cold, as I got some interesting results.
ambient outside -18.6C, corrector heater off
03:58 -24.8C just opened roof
04:00 -27.5C then slew to jupiter
04:02 -28.1C
04:07 -21C
04:13 -15C
04:15 -15.2C and now turn on the corrector heater 10% duty cycle
04:18 -14C still -18C ambient outside
04:22 -12.6C
This does not make a lot of sense to me.. .will repeat it and maybe take another set of measurements of some other object at the same time to compare against.
This was the best image of the session, at 10:34 UTC. Io can be seen in the lower left of the image.
The filename now contains the date, UTC time, #alignment points, percent frames used, Jupiters altitude and apparent diameter. The GRS is not in view at this time. There is some nice detail in the South Equatorial belt .
Better luck Sunday morning.. will try again then.
jupiter_20170114_103430_Exp43_ap21p50alt38d37.png-annotated.png