Ad Astra Observatory

Part of the reason that it’s taken so long to get to First Light is that I am actively knocking the rust off of my astronomy workflow. There are so many little variables that come into play, that a lot of things have to “go right” in order to make even the simplest image.

In addition, it takes a while to get the hang of posting images that are easy to download, so even once the collection and stacking is done, there are still things to consider.

I began the evening focused on the moon, before sunset, which ended up reminding me (the hard way) that when you do a sub-30sec exposure, the Canon needs to be manually (and physically) put back into bulb mode; I usually set “test” shots to 31sec out of reflex, and that’s why. The stuff we forget when it’s not used.

I used PHD Guiding, pretty simple. There are tweaks to be done, but it just works. I started with 0.05sec corrections, which essentially showed what the seeing looked like, and then I switched to 10s corrections, and let the NJP just “surf” for awhile. It’s amazing how quiet the graph got when I did that.

There is quite a bad drift problem; I’m not sure which direction, or where it is, at the moment, but I will get there. I am just documenting it now, so that I can refer back here later.

Midway through the evening, I realized that I now have a VM that can run the observatory the same way I was in CA. I need to snaphot the VM and remember this. And when the new camera gets here (it’s currently in-flight from The Maple Leaf State), I will start with a new, blank copy of the VM.

I tried FocusMax, but that requires a level of configuration that I’m clearly not ready for, yet. Simply jogging the focuser got me close enough. I look forward to seeing what the diffraction spikes look like once I get FM really rolling.

The network connection on the RPi is a little flaky; I don’t know why, but it seems to drop its DHCP quite often, and it’s tough to make it come back. Something else for the backlog.

I ran what I hope is the final USB cable setup. It’s 3.0 all the way through (although the VM is only doing 2.0), and I figured out how to get the repeater cable in there properly, so that feels pretty solid.

I need to do a star test to make sure that the collimation is correct; I don’t trust my collimation skills under the best of circumstances, and the 1:45am job I did can’t be perfect.

I found myself back in the mode of looking for targets just rising over the eastern horizon, but with the manual dome, I think that I actually need to be shooting targets in the west, so that I can, in theory, leave the dome open overnight (without the morning sun frying anything). I am getting better at dome placement, but I am looking forward to having better targeting from the forward-looking webcam. The scope and guider sure do take up a lot of the shutter width; I get about an hour before I have to move the dome.

Because the moon is waxing gibbous, I was shooting stars and star clusters (except for M57, which was far across the sky from the bright moon). Next week, I can switch to galaxies. Hopefully I will have some of the drift and focus stuff worked out, too.

I need whole new sets of calibration frames (darks, flats, bias, etc); I guess darks will be shot against the closed dome. Flats will, as usual, take a moment to figure out.