Ad Astra Observatory

Well, I had 2 clear nights over the weekend, and came up empty for a new photo — I got lots of data last night, but the object is big and dim, and I don’t think that I got anything useful. I’ll go back after it with Ha sometime.

Pumpkin has such a wide field of view (on the order of 3º x 2º, 6 full moons across) that there are really a strictly limited number of targets that work well. Large objects are scattered across the sky in summer, fall, and winter, but in spring, the pickings get slim, as all the targets are tiny (distant galaxies, and local small clusters).

I realize that I’m writing this in January, but by 11pm or midnight, the constellations that are rising are all the spring ones (that will be near zenith at sundown by March or April).

I’d like to get one of the other telescopes up and running, but I’m trying to concentrate on getting everything running really smoothly with one scope, before moving on. So, I spent some time getting reacquainted with an old nemesis, FocusMax.

My battles with FM are well-documented, but with the help of The Astro Jedi, I was able to get 3 successful V-curves run last night (one from a successful First Light Wizard, and then 2 additional). Here are some notes from getting things set up:

1) min exposure time needed to be changed from 0.5s to 2s
2) max exposure time needed to be changed from 5s to 20s
3) Method needed to be set to “Current Focuser Position”

Once I got those things handled, the First Light Wizard was able to get off the ground. My HFD went from 16(!) to 3. That’s good. It’s some kind of measurement of how big the stars are (and it might be “in pixels”). The rig does seem to be focused better now.

I picked an area of fairly blank sky just off of Capella; having the FOV of the camera in the star chart software is critical. Made it very easy to duck in between some brighter field stars, to find an area that FM could deal with.

So, FM working again, check. When I go back to reflectors, I will have to fight it again, but for now, focusing the scope is fast and easy.

I did something dumb on Friday, and am still recovering. For some reason, the Windows XP VM that I use to drive the rig gets itself tied in knots once in awhile, and it just needs to get reset. Well, I reset it a little too hard, and ended up using a snapshot that was taken back before the new drive system was installed. Grr. Well, I need to figure out how to configure all the stuff anyway, so it was good practice getting up and running again…

…except the mount is still screwed up. The USB-Serial converter wanted to be COM4, but the mount software really wanted it to be COM1, which the computer said was “in use”… yuck. I forced it to COM1, but this has caused much pain, and I will have to look into it further.

The mount seems to be able to sync and slew ok, but when I try to hook up the guiding software, things just go sideways; the computer starts locking up, and the mount can’t calibrate with the guider.

The guide camera has always been fairly bulletproof, and suddenly it’s a weak link. I have to figure out what to do about this; the Jedi suggests that there’s a problem with the USB connection to the computer. I don’t know. I just wish I could get all of the things running, all at the same time.

We will get there, just needs some TLC. The clouds are back, time for lots and lots of testing.