Day: 2 March 2020

Viewing Report 2nd March 2020 – Travel Scope

Viewing time period – 19:30 – 23:00

Tonight I wanted to continue to try and get guiding working, I setup outside on a much calmer night, no real wind tonight. Bob once again is playing with the IMT3.

I setup in the same place on the patio and again fed the USB cable through the window. I used the Polemaster to get the mount in the right position and then slewed to Betelgeuse to see if it was in the centre and it was!

I then slewed to M35 and connected the guider with PHD2. After some back and forth I got it calibrated but it was complaining about the amount of steps being to small for calibration and the guiding was all over the place. The screen brightness was still very white. I solved this by changing the Gain for the camera.

I decided to give TheSky X a go at guiding instead of PHD2. Unfortunatly it was not much better and at one point I could see the downloaded image from the guider then suddenly it disappeared, I had changed nothing but now it was black. Nothing I could do would make it come back including disconnecting. So I went back to PHD2.

I managed to fix the issue in PHD on the amount of Steps being used to calibrate by adjusting the calibration step size down from 5333 to 1300. This increased the steps from 3 to 5. Much better and now I don’t get the error.

PHD2 good calibration

However right now I still cannot get the Dec to behave. Whilst I can take a 5 min image the Dec is wonder up from where it should be and no amount of tweaking the Aggressiveness or Hysteresis changes that.

Furthermore, I decided to take images with The Sky X over EzCap but after 4 images TSX hangs every time……. So I have now given up tonight and will come back out the next cleanser night to resolve the issues.

PHD2 DEC drift up!

Viewing Report 1st March 2020 – Travel Scope

Viewing time period – 17:35 – 23:00

First time out for a very long time with the travel setup. I need to get the guiding working before the Tenerife holiday in July. I have left Bob to play with the IMT3 whilst I work through the bugs.

The challenge is at first remembering how to set everything up. I found after some effort I was actually missing a cable, it was in the black wheelie case in the garage with the laptop tent and scope daytime cover, but more about that later.

So So after finding a place on the patio where I could feed the USB cable through the Orangery window, I put the Berlebach tripod down and placed the MyT mount on top. I tightened the screws and then placed the Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 ED on top of the Versa Plate. Once in position I balanced the scope then connected the various cables, now all through the mount due to my good friend Bob making up some power connectors for me.

So I tried to guide through PHD2. There was a large wind blowing. On trying to calibrate the scope would not move. After what seemed like an hour I remembered that cable, this was again the ST4 guider cable that is needed on the Mac if you are guiding with PHD2 as there is no ASCOM. So I connected the ST4 cable and it worked.

What I could not achieve tonight was to get the guide graph behaving, it was a mess. The wind was at fault but still there were other issues, not least the slider to control the contrast of the screen was causing anything above 0.5s to become white.

Guiding a mess with PHD2

After many hours I gave up and brought the rig in. I had been using TheSkyX to slew there scope, PHD2 to guide and EzCap to connect to the QHY168C camera and take images. I will try again tomorrow night.

EzCap image of Betelgeuse