Month: April 2020

Viewing Report 3rd April 2020 – IMT3

Viewing time period – 18:56 – 00:59

Opening dome to cool it down

So early on as always I opened the dome to cool down. Tonight Bob, Gingergeek and I want to image Venus in the Pleiades. Even before it got dark and as I slewed the telescopes to Venus, it was visible straight away so I took a quick image, 0.001s from both the 12″ and Bob’s FS102.

Venus 0.001s exposure from the OS 12″ during daytime
Venus 0.001s exposure from the Tak FS102 during daytime

I then went off to watch TV with Helen whilst Gingergeek and Bob grabbed some more images of Venus.

Around 10pm I re-joined Bob and GingerGeek and we set about imaging Venus as it passed by M45 Pleiades in the Tak FS 102. We then went on to perform autofocus on the Tak followed buy setting up the autofocus on the Esprit 120ED

Before the clouds decided to put a stop to play, we took some images of M53 the globular cluster on the Esprit around 00:10am using the Luminance filter.

Quick stack and stretch of M53 from Skywatcher Esprit 120 ED

By 00:59 the clouds finished play 🙁

Viewing Report 31st March 2020 – IMT3 12″ – Sync and Solve

Viewing time period – 20:30 – 22:20

Tonight GingerGeek, Bob and I wanted to make sure the newly installed version update for SGPro was working. In particular we wanted to get the sync and solve working, so that we could centre an object, but also the autofocus as the was a major update.

In TSX select an object and slew to it
In SGPro take a quick 5s image of the object
In SGPro click the Solve and Sync button on the bottom left
In SGPro the image is now solved and synced to in SGPro
In SGPro right mouse click on the object and select Center Here from the menu
In SGPro select Yes on the Center Telescope window
In SGPro take another 5s image using Frame and Focus
In SGPro the object should now be in the centre
In TSX from the Telescope tab click on the Start Up button and select Star Synchronisation
In TSX make sure Synchronize mount into existing model is selected and click on Sync
In TSX notice the FoV indicator from the camera has shifted to a new position
In SGPro take another 5s image using Frame and Focus
In SGPro the resulting image should not have moved

The mount in TSX and SGPro are now synced to the correct position in the sky.