I had a bunch of maintenance piling up in the obvservatory, so I decided to do some of it since it’s raining all weekend.

I spent a little time getting the mount more level, and adjusting the elevation on the polar alignment. I still don’t think it’s perfect, but I think I’m closer.

The polar alignment still needs adjustment in azimuth, and a final check in elevation.

I installed the new EEPROM (v1.04; apparently 1.05 is only from Goerlich) and a new battery in the mount. I also hooked up the GPS and got the time and location correct.

I mounted up the new autoguider and tried to take a couple of daytime shots to test it out, but the observatory computer fried, so I spent the time to rebuild the observatory machine from the ground up. That took longer than I expected, but I think it’s up and running now. I was having an awful time trying to get VNC to work properly. It was running really slowly on a fresh install of Win XP SP3. After much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, I rebooted all the elements of the LAN (modem, router, etc), tweaked the firewall on the new machine, and installed several Windows and Dell updates. Something in there “clicked”, and now it’s up again and fast as ever.

I took the C9.25 to a local park and set up the artificial star about 75yd away. That was more than enough to get me in focus, and with a few tweaks of the collimation knobs, I saw, for the first time, *perfect* Airy disks! I was collimating at 700x, so gorgeous. The C9.25 is ready for… something. It’s back in its (new) case for now, but ready to rock.

Buoyed by that success, I decided to try to collimate Veronica, too. This was not as successful. I will have to read up on collimation, because the closest I could get to Airy disks was seeing little tiny “crosses” (even on the dimmest light), which merged “vertical” if I went one way out of focus, and “horizontal” if I went the other way. There is a ton of light being thrown off outside of the 4 main diffraction spikes, too. I think I’m closer, but I will be using the C9.25 or Pumpkin to do polar alignment and pointing models for awhile…

A very productive weekend, despite only having 90 minutes of clear sky.

I had a bunch of stuff on my TODO list after last night.

So I took care of some of it while the sun was up today.

I recharged the deep-cycle battery.

I figured out how to get the FocusMax windows back (thanks to some help from a friend).

I got the COM ports for the ST-4 and G-11 figured out, so both can connect to MaxIM.

I upgraded to the latest version of ASCOM (5.5.1) and the latest Gemini ASCOM driver (Gemini .NET).

I moved the laptop into the docking station and the ST-4 on top of the docking station.

I re-soldered the flat box and the polar scope illuminator (which I also wrapped in heatshrink, which will hopefully make it stronger).

I hooked up a 12v power supply near the flat box so it won’t overvolt (and has a nice power switch).

I found the Gizmo (still need to make sure it’s working).

I worked on Velcroing the cables a bit (still needs work).

I cleaned up the observatory somewhat.

In short, with the focusing that happened yesterday, I am just about ready to get shooting as soon as the sun goes down. w00t!

Clear Sky Clock said it would be cloudy all night, so of course it stayed 90% clear until about midnight, when it socked in. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I decided to get the autoguider up and running tonight. I wanted everything focused and aligned so that I can get started shooting again for real.

On top of this desire, my new clip-in Ha filter showed up today, and I really wanted to try it out!

So I hooked up the autoguider, got it all focused and balanced the rig. I booted up the scope, which wanted to cold-start again. No problem. Quick slew to Betelgeuse… and that’s where the problems started.

For some reason, the main scope and its finder (which were aligned as recently as 2 days ago, and have not been touched) are no longer in alignment. No problem; I see the star in the finder, I’ll just sweep the scope around until I find it.

No dice.

I don’t know what my problem was, but I tried everything I could think of, including sweeping the scope by hand, and I could not find *anything*. It took me 40 minutes to finally stumble over Rigel and then get the finder and scope aligned. While that was in the vicinity, I set up the guide scope to be roughly aligned, too.

As part of this fun, I figured out that the reticle is not centered in the guiding eyepiece. Again. That is a silly feature. But I figured out how to get it centered, so now the guide finder, guide scope, and reticle eyepiece all agree about the center of the field. Which is nice.

So after losing about 45 minutes of clear sky, I got the scope turned on and started an alignment run… the deep cycle battery died. argh. OK, set up the 15v power supply — deal with the battery later. Now I’m working the alignment (oh, I had mis-calculated GMT earlier in the evening, too — I was having a bit of a day), and the polar alignment is way off compared to a few days ago. Pulled out the polar alignment scope illuminator, and it’s got a busted power cable. Again. That is the worst design ever. I decided to just go forward with it; I’ll deal with polar alignment later. I need to be using my Gizmo anyway. Where is that thing? hmm…

OK, so I’m aligned. I boot up the computer, and shoot a test image of Betelgeuse through the Ha filter. It is of course not in focus. No problem. Fire up FocusMax (nothing can go wrong with the focuser — it’s on COM1), and …

all of the FocusMax windows show up offscreen. I have no idea why. I even tried to Regedit them into place; no dice. Meanwhile, tick, tick, tick, clear sky still, but I can see clouds moving in. Also, Orion is now well past meridian. grr!

Fine. I fire up the focuser in MaxIM (I tried to get the ST-4 and mount working in MaxIM, too, but needed to reinstall the USB-to-Serial drivers for reasons passing understanding, and never got that working right — you guessed it, deal with it later), did an autofocus run in MaxIM for the first time ever.

Let me say at this point that I really like the new MaxIM focus routine. It brings up a V-curve just like FocusMax, and while it seems to converge on a solution a little more slowly, it does seem to get there pretty well, as evidenced by the fact that in just a few minutes, I had autofocused the Ha filter on Betelgeuse! (FWHM of ~5.5, high winds and encroaching clouds and sketchy collimation, so give me a break, this is about what I usually get)

So I fired a 40sec exposure of Betelgeuse, so I could see some diffraction spikes, and got a bright fuzzy ball with lots of stars in the background. I looked up, and couldn’t even see the star through the cloud cover. OK, I get it. So I slewed over to M42 anyway, because I was going to make sure I was in focus.

A couple of 40sec and then 2min frames of M42 looked pretty good given they were clearly destroyed by clouds.

I tried to set up the ST-4, but it spent a lot of time losing the star and giving me “E E” followed by “-E -E” type corrections, so I turned it off. I only like guiding in MaxIM if I can help it.

At this point, it was about midnight, and we get to where I started this post… socked in solid with clouds, and no images to show for it.

And a longer todo list.

But a few more things are set up again, including of all things, the autofocus routine in MaxIM! Cool.

Fingers crossed for a clear night this weekend. Next one won’t be wasted.

There were high, thin clouds all night. Only the brightest stars were shining through.

So I decided to spend the evening preparing for better nights.

I mounted the DAs on Veronica, so that Veronica now has a “saddle plate” on top, for Pumpkin’s new rail to ride in. I installed Pumpkin in guide scope position, and roughly balanced in RA with a second counterweight.

I spent the rest of the evening clearing off disk space on the astro laptop. Now that I have a primary laptop (the little mac netbook), I cleaned off all of the games and music and other stuff that isn’t needed on a second-tier box, and created 15gb of new disk space for putting astro pics into. Nifty. There’s still a bit more cleaning that needs to be done (email and contacts), but I have plenty of space (5 DVDs worth) to cram RAW frames for now.

I still need to get the ST-4 hooked back up, and I also need to get all the cables run cleanly again. But I am mostly all hooked up again, and ready to do the polar alignment/collimation/focus routine so I’m ready to get the job done.

I love it when a plan comes together.

I’m testing out the new C9.25 tonight. Last night, I’m writing off as a “configuration” night.

The sky is a little cloudy tonight, high thin clouds that serve to brighten up an otherwise OK subframe.

One thing that I’ve noticed, though, is that my 5min subframes are all saturating. This is a mixture of a couple of things. First of all, I lost my white balance reference image (I thought it might be interfering with the “raw”ness of the RAW images). I need to re-shoot that the next sunny day we get.

More important, however, I left the MPCC (not important) and the IDAS-LPS filter (very important) on Veronica.

So all the images are bright red (can be fixed in PS) and saturating with skyglow (oops).

There are a lot of variables that need to be correct in order to get a good image. I tend to run into problems with forgetting things as it is, so the more variables that can be thought of as “fixed”, the better. This is a good thing, because it means that I can forget about 75% of the variables from night to night. But when a new piece of equipment comes along, I have to do a lot of testing before I can recall which pieces and parts need to be paid attention to in the new setup.

For instance, the reason I left the MPCC behind is that my understanding is that SCTs don’t exhibit a lot of coma, so it might be counter productive. But the IDAS LPS is sitting at the end of the MPCC. Oops.

Other than being red and saturated, the images look nice. M51 covers a lot more of the frame than it did before. I can still place it in the frame vertically with a lot of empty space around it, so the C9.25 will only get me so far into the tiny galaxies. But I am going to try to put together a side-by-side comparison of M51 from various scopes to see how much the magnification is changing things.

still having problem with the ST-4 not wanting to calibrate in Dec. Might be the near-zenith position, might be the floppy focuser, I don’t know what. It’s just annoying.

BTW, as I type, I’m on the Ubuntu 12” laptop, VNCd into the 15” XP laptop in the observatory. I’m also Skyping on the 9” OSX laptop, which is VNCd into the Mac server. It’s all quite geeky. I. Love. It.

My autoguiding isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. I have a lot of new gear that I’m trying to figure out; G-11, Gemini, ASCOM, ST-4, MaxIM. Each of these adds a little bit of uncertainty to the mix.

Of them, the ST-4 (which guides the mount via 4-way relay switches) is the equipment I’m most used to and comfortable with, so all other things being equal, I try to stick to using the ST-4 relays to do the guiding job; they’ve done great for me for years.

However, I’ve noticed that when I’m using the ST-4 standalone with the Gemini, I get long strings of 0 and 1 corrections (that’s as much as 1/5 of a pixel, or ~1.5”), followed by a 5, then a -5, then more 0/1s. So it feels like there is some overcorrection that is happening. To help with this, I set the ST-4 to average about 3 frames, so a 5 usually turns into a a 1 or 2, but I maybe do a couple of them.

When I added MaxIM into the mix, it handles this with “aggressiveness”, which essentially sends a percentage of the asked-for correction. I never really found that aggressiveness and the ST-4 relays worked all that well together; it seemed like the aggro settings were not having much effect.

So I switched over to using ASCOM; ie the ST-4 takes the photo, MaxIM parses it and decides on the correction, and then MaxIM sends the correction directly to the mount via a RS232 connection. After some initial hiccups, I think I have this working pretty well. I set the aggressiveness to 3, and that seems to be enough to keep things more or less in check. I’m not sure why. I think that the ASCOM control might be able to tell the mount “just slow down” or “just speed up”, rather than “go left” or “go right”. I’m not sure about that, but … shrug.

One problem that I’ve been seeing is that tracking works great for 45m or so and then starts getting worse and worse. I have no idea why.

I tried turning on the relays the other night, to see if the 45m problem was related to the ASCOM stuff, but that was a mistake. The relays made things go haywire. At this point, the ASCOM settings are tuned, so I am going to stick with them.

Art Morton wrote:

> The silly little galaxies are quite visible too.
(: I hardly ever see shots of M51 with the little guys showing. Also, I
*never* see shots with that bright-ass star in them. I need to figure
out what star that is; I can probably see it in the finder, if I know
which one it is. That will help with framing.
> Come on, you have to be dancing around.
I’m pretty pleased with the results of flat-fielding.

I feel like I’m progressing by leaps and bounds. Now that I have the
ability to produce some fairly clean data, I think that my next step is
to learn more about processing. I think that there’s detail that I’m
leaving on the table. I mean, all I’m really doing to my images is
contrast stretching right now.

I was amazed to see those dust bunnies disappear. I really felt like a

“real imager” when I saw that calibrated stack. (:

I still have to figure out my whole workflow; I had to reprocess the
flats several times (did I mention that I ended up re-shooting the flats
as Raw Color to match the rest of the stuff?), and doing any step wrong
really screwed the image up.

So I have to learn exactly what I need to do in order to get the
calibration right. Once I get a good set of master frames, I am off and

running. By the way, do you:
1) shoot darks every session
2) have a pre-shot set of “master darks” of a variety of exposure
lengths (or the one exposure length you always use)
3) have a pre-shot master dark that has been bias-subtracted so it can
be scaled

If it’s 3), how long are the subframes? AIP book suggests 5x longer than

your normal subframes, but that just seems silly.

I thought it was pretty funny that I could do some real astronomy on a
cloudy night last night, shooting some flats and flatdarks.

I’m very pleased with my M51. I’m ready to start whacking away at the
rest of the sky. Heck, I can probably start doing mosaics now that I can
correct vignetting. w00t!

I need to get anything useful off my hard drive, and then reformat it. I

keep running out of space. The raw flats (x30) and flatdarks (x10) are
1.5Gb. Ouch.

J

The other morning when I was awakened at 5am by sprinklers, I noticed that Jupiter was past meridian (meaning so was Sagittarius, but it was too light for me to see it). This means that if I did a really heroic night of astronomy, I could probably post an early image of the summer nebulae!

I hate it when I do that, though — then I have nothing to shoot in August. (:

Orion’s new planetary camera, pros and cons.
Apparently Orion ships Max Essentials with the S^4 because K3CCDTools won’t read the camera. Disappointing, but the K3 “free lunch” was too nice to last. Works like a champ with my NexImage, though.

With the 2000mm SCT and stacked 2x barlows, Saturn is almost too big to fit in the FOV of the NexImage at 640×480. A good reason to bump to the Orion cam, which does 1280×1024.

I am frankly shocked that K3 hasn’t stepped up to working with the Orion camera. Makes me wonder what QHY is doing in firmware… hmmm…

Planetary processing tips:
I usually aim for the “max” value in the histogram to read a little under 128 (the halfway point), because images brighten some when you stack them. In K3, there’s a nice histogram meter that helps with this.

Note: You have to do this while focusing/shooting, not while processing.

I need to figure out a good process to fix any AVI’s that have gone south. Apparently, the solution is on the K3Tools page along with all the software tools to fix these problems.

I’ll have to go search his pages to find this. I hate it when I run into processing problems on my planetary stuff. It eats so much disk space that I can’t afford to keep the .avi’s around for long.

Webcam autoguiding
Exposure length
I have been sniffing around the edges of trying to use a webcam for guiding. The main problem, as I see it, is that my ST-4 (which works awesome) needs 0.5sec exposures to find guidestars, and I usually have to guide on mag 4 or brighter stars as it is. With a webcam, the longest exposure is usually 0.2sec, so I might have to guide on brighter stars.

Mechanics
Also, I’m not sure exactly how the guide control would work. I’d have some kind of software to read the images coming in off the cam (MaxDSLR knows how to do this), but then I would need to get those commands to the mount somehow. Now that I have a Gemini mount, I can play around with mount control via ASCOM. But otherwise, if I wanted to use the autoguider port on the mount, I’d need a GPUSB or something.

A webcam + ASCOM-controlled mount would also save me a few cables — right now, I use 2xUSB-to-serial to connect the ST-4 and mount to the computer, plus autoguider, power, and CCD cables from the ST-4 to various points around the mount. I would still have the 2 USB connections to the computer, but I’d save the other 3, since the camera is powered by the same cable that it transmits its images over, and since the mount would not need anything plugged into the autoguider port.

Adding a GPUSB to the mix would still save me a cable or two, but would kind of defeat the purpose of this svelte setup.

I’m also considering a tandem rig. I think that would help some of the balance problems I’ve had. Probably won’t happen soon. Pumpkin is basically a finder anyway.

Focusing
Using a webcam for a guider would really speed up focusing the guider, since it can stream images in realtime. In theory, one could find perfect focus in 30sec every time. I can never get perfect focus in 30sec. It always takes sooo looong for the focuser to move since I have to move it with the buttons and not just twirl the dial until I’m close… *snif* I miss my manual focuser, just a little.

An alternative

The new Orion autoguider ($250 as of this writing) is an interesting idea — It would have the flexibility to do either autoguider port (via its integral autoguider output) or let the computer do ASCOM. That’s a serious contender for ST-4 replacement.

I have to say that it’s mostly my emotional connection to the ST-4 that keeps it around at this point. Plus, the laughable concept that I might run it standalone at some point. The ST-4 has been a real workhorse for me, and I’d hate to let it go. But the Orion autoguider is really tickling the back of my brain.

I just picked up a Mac mini to use as an astronomy machine out in the observatory. Essentially, I need something that can run headless, and provide USB ports to the various gear on the mount.

This poses a problem, since the newly-purchased astronomy hub software that I’ve just bought, MaxDSLR v.4, only runs in Windows.

So I bought VMWare Fusion for the Mac, and installed the astronomy software there.

But now I am trying to VNC from a PC laptop over wireless to a Mac and into the VM running on that Mac. And it’s *slow*. So is it slow because of VNC? Because of VMWare? Because MaxDSLR is slow? Who knows?

I’m considering installing Win XP on the Mac and running everything natively. I’d prefer to keep it running Mac OSX (which I am beginning to like), but I just feel like anything I do is throwing good money after bad.

One thing that I definitely need to do is get better wireless reception in the observatory. Maybe a trip to Fry’s for a wireless repeater is required.

My friend Art has a very similar setup, and uses a Mac running VMWare at the mount to drive everything. The only difference seems to be that he’s connecting from another Mac. Argh.

It will all probably snap together suddenly at some point and just start really singing. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine that I’ll never get it working right and the Russians will beat us to the moon in a cakewalk. sigh.

Art Morton wrote:
>
> On Apr 26, 2008, at 10:59 PM, Jimbo S. Harris wrote:
>
>> I’m more and more convinced that the Nikon is causing me more

>> headache than it’s worth.
> This does sound frustrating. I spend the time on the dining room
> table working this stuff. At night after work, I am just to tired.
In principle, the thing works fine. But it’s easy to get things out of
synch. I imagine that it would be easier if there were discrete “open
shutter” and “close shutter” commands. I wonder if the Canon will be

different in this regard…
>> The VMware via Mac via VNC is really not working for me. It’s just
>> too damn slow. I don’t think that the Mac is going to last as a
>> long-term astronomy solution.
>
> This is Mac to PC not Mac to Mac, correct?

yes, I’m connecting from my PC laptop to the Mac mini via VNC. The mini
is running VMWare in which WinXP is running. That’s where Max lives.

By the way, do you ever have problems with VMware losing USB ports?
Lately, I’ve had to reboot the Mac a few times, because VMWare will see
my USB hub sometimes but not other times, and when it doesn’t see it, I
only get those devices back by rebooting the Mac. it’s weird.

>> And the VM blue screened on me again tonight, in the middle of a
>> photo run. Apparently, the snapshot that I have is before I put in
>> the Max license key, so now I have to go and spend a few hours
>> figuring out what is broken and needs reinstalling, over the slow-ass
>> network connection.
>
> Just bring the silly thing in the house and work it.

Yes, I got it all back together. But it’s just one of those things
that’s not going to get done at 11:30pm. It needs concentration and the
fact I was already frustrated at it would have just grated on me while I
was doing it. shrug.

I need to go to Fry’s and get a wireless repeater. I think that might help.
>> I’m really hating astronomy right now.

>
> Put everything down, look at the big TV, and play with the Baby Mama
> and the litle one!
(: That’s about what I did.
>> Is there a way to make that stuff save “outside” the VM, into the
>> Mac somewhere?

> That can be done. I have not blown up my VM yet…. So, I save in the
> VM environment. During set up, you can make that transition drive and
> use it to same. I just made my the Mac desktop. It works.
OK, I’ll try it again. I was recently having a problem where WinXP (in
the VM) could write to my “I:” drive (I mapped the VMWare shared folder

to I: within windows), but Max said “that doesn’t appear to be a valid
location”. So I had to write the files locally to the VM. grr. I’m still
working on it.
What would be perfect is being able to have Max write the files
somewhere that was directly accessible from my laptop, like into the
Apple Public Shared Folders place.

…

but I haven’t gotten that working yet. I have a lot of new stuff and
coordinating it all is bumming me out. (:

I got out 2 nights later and produced that M51 with the streaked stars.
Add mount balancing to the list of stuff to be done.

J