Ad Astra Observatory

I tried some new stuff last night and screwed myself up.
I was all mounted and focused, so I decided to work a nice easy object, and chose M81.

M81 was near zenith, so I decided to shoot West instead of East, so that I could get maximum imaging time without scope running into mount.

The tracking was looking great as normal, but the mount was *not* behaving; every one of the 20m images was trailed. I switched to 5m images, and of course (the things we take for granted) those worked fine. I didn’t want to have to wrestle 60 images in the morning, though, so I switched again to 10m, and those looked like they’d be fine. Set it up for 30 images and went to bed around midnight.

I ran out of time this morning during image processing; I have a 23Mb PNG file that I was going to do my processing mojo on to see what I got. But I only have GIMP at work, and it doesn’t do the same job that Photoshop does. I’ll process it tonight when I get home.

I’m confused about the tracking errors. I think maybe MaxIM screwed me with the “Scope Dec” thing. I dunno. Clearly I have more to learn about this mount and the sky and how stuff works.

In order to get maximum time on the whole tracking thing, I got the mount to “bend over backwards” to pick up M81 still east of zenith. It took a little finagling to get it to go. First it thought the scope was pointed East (and was doing backwards GOTOs), then it gave me some “meridian flip required” stuff, but eventually I got it to GOTO M81 in steps (sync on Dubhe, GOTO a star between Dubhe and M81. Center the star, sync on that. Then slew to M81).

I still don’t understand the meridian behavior of the mount, and the Tak group is ignoring me.

shrug. I’ll play around with it in daylight, and figure out how the settings affect things.

I woke up this morning and the mount was still tracking in RA, nearly CW down with the scope low enough that I could almost close the roof without moving it off of M81. Max was sitting there with a “dark frame required” since it finished its run at 5am. I should have gone for 36 images. sigh.

I will have to look at the individual frames more closely, but I do believe that I’ve gotten another 30 perfect subframes out of 4026. Works for me.