Viewing time period – 21:16 – 23:24
So first I could not see any USB devices that were plugged in to the USB hub on the mount. A reboot of the mount fixed that problem. Next I could not auto focus, I did not get to the bottom of that so tried to focus manually best I could. Then PHD2 settings were wrong for the OS12 and the associated lodestar guider, the calibration steps were 100 rather than 400, the min move was 0.66 rather than 0.18. I had taken screen shots before on the blog so changed them back, I am not sure why they have changed. I then managed to calibrate the guider on the OS12, given I have taken off the camera to clean the filters the other day.
@22:15 I started imaging RGB on M94 on the OS12.
The guiding was not bad after calibration. I set to expose once every 8 seconds on the only guide star in the FoV.
What I do need to do is set the FoV indicator in TSX for the Lodestar guider to the correct position to help find a guide star. Else I really should try to guide with one of the other scopes. I am now off to bed, I will leave the scope collecting the rest of the green, 2 left and the final 12 blue. Then Bob will take over imaging for the rest of the night.
Bob took over Green which lost the guide star, so he performed a meridian flip, continued on the Green and then took some Blue. Bob then took some HA, OIII, SII at 5 and 10 minutes for a test. The Ha would be useful for the galaxy as an LRGBHa image. Bob turned in at 2:50am.
I also noticed this morning that the Offset was wrong in the ASI camera profile which was called ZWO camera in the dropdown and in fact was set to 50 rather than 21 for this Gain which was correctly set at 139. I have also changed the OSA12 No Guider profile to use the ASI2 camera rather than the ZWO one, not sure the difference. I have adjusted the setting back to 21 so all the OS12 profiles now use Gain 139 Offset 21 as their standard. If we want the other 2 setting that need changing for each time we run, along with subsequent darks and flats etc would be Gain 0 Offset 10 and Gain 75 Offset 12. For the moment the Darks and Flats etc from last night are Offset 50 so we can only use for last nights images.