Imaging Day 2
Last night was the 2nd successive night of somewhat successful imaging, mainly used as a configuration and calibration session.
New sticky foamy weatherstripping went along the wall/roof interface, to help stop the NorEaster from blowing water inside like last week 🙁
Velcro was added to the new handset so it can now rest on the velcro’d tripod leg and not on the floor.
The cables were cleaned up and moved out of the way.
Given all that, a fresh power up and into autoalign using the camera smaller FOV and the reticle in firecapture instead of the eyepiece, got a successful alignment but upon a goto Jupiter command it was 10-20 degrees off target!
Frustrating! The telescope time showed correct, location was correct, daylight savings was on. Not sure of the GPS-UTC adjustment… it is zero, perhaps it needs to be something else.
When pointing is off, usually so is tracking. and the tracking was off!
For the 30 second exposures of Jupiter, there was a constant need to manually guide.
Enough of that, let’s see the images!
Jupiter was 16 degrees off the horizon, horrible seeing and transparency
| The first image is a 30 second run at 20ms exposures at F10, FL=2000mm, stacked using the best 10% of 1330 frames and registax wavelet sharpened, with no firecapture autoalign. |
| The second image is much the same, with firecapture autoalign turned on. This time the best 25% of 1489 frames were stacked. The noise is considerably reduced moving from 10% to 25%. |
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The third and last image of Jupiter last night was 120 seconds, and the best 25% of 5962 frames. The noise reduces again and this is probably the best I can hope for this Jupiter season, as it continues to sink further into the west, lower and lower altitude every day. |
Saturn was next! Three images, 30, 30, and 120 seconds in the same pattern as above
| The first image is 30 seconds, no autoalign, 68ms exposures and the best 25% of 426 frames. Saturn was almost due south (transiting) and only an altitude of 23 degrees. |
| The second image is much the same, with firecapture autoalign turned on. This time the best 50% of 427 frames were stacked. The noise is reduced moving from 25% to 50%. |
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The third and last image of Saturn last night was 120 seconds, and the best 50% of 1698 frames. The noise reduces again and this is probably the best I can hope for this Saturn season, as it may get a little darker but will start to move further into the west, lower and lower altitude every day. |
All of these required manual guiding, so that is the next priority.. to troubleshoot the alignment, pointing and tracking issue.
Once that is resolved, a small dew shield needs to be built to protect the corrector plate from dewing. There is clearance for only about 8″ where the rule of thumb is 1.5x the diameter, in this case 8*1.5=12″.
There is no 12vdc power in The Serenity Observatory yet but probably will be in the near future. Then we can look at a dew heating band around the corrector plate.