Guiding – IMT3b Observatory

Imaging test (8th June 2024)

So given it was a non-work night and predicted to be clear Dave invited me over to test the gear/setup prior to the BASEG Tenerife 2024 trip.

Given we are fast approaching the summer solstice, the nights are getting shorter and lighter. The Annual Darkness chart for IMT3 shows that we currently have no astronomical darkness and the nautical darkness lasts only for some 3.5hrs (left image) and now compare that the darkness graph for Mount Teide in Tenerife (right image) and although we lose some dark hours around the Summer Solstice it’s not as much as is lost being located at 52°N.

Setup – added BlueAstro stick station to measure pressure as Pegasus have not exposed the pressure measurement from the NYX101 mount to the ASCOM layer … why not ? Added weight bag to NYX-101 and GL.inet travel router to top of the scope as MS Windows keeps messing up the Wi-Fi hotspot on the Mele Quieter3C if it does not detect a internet connection ….. how stupid is that. Now I have a permanent hotspot thanks to the instructions given by Cuiv the Lazy Geek on his YouTube channel.

When attempting to polar align when using the QHY PoleMaster I noticed that the sky brightness below 15 mag²/sec (measured by a Unihedron SQM) produced a white screen due to over exposure – the minimal exposure in the now aged the QHY PoleMaster software (> 4yrs since last release) was 50ms which is too long even though I could eyeball Polaris in the early evening sky.

NINA 3.0 start up had not detected the QHY native driver and after I shutdown and restarted the app it then was able to detect the QHY 268C camera. However, it disconnected when it could not cool to -10℃ which I’ve never encountered before. I did eventually managed to get it cool and stay connected.

During guiding calibration OpenPHD2 would constantly complain about losing the star. Again the star was clearly visible on the PHD display and after downgrading from 2.6.13dev4 to dev3 and then I suddenly realised the value the error was referring to. I changed the minimal star HFD down to 1.0 from 1.5, also recreated the dark library to remove the possibility of the guider attempting to guide on a hot pixel.

Once guiding, the guide graphs were reporting 0.08 – 0.19 arcsec total polar alignment error. Hopefully I will learn to improve that and maybe repeat the polar alignment procedure or use PHD drift align to refine it.

I also forgot to change filter at the start of the evening from the Antila Quad Band filter to the Baader UV/IR filter. I noticed a halo from the bright star Arcturus in the constellation Bootes which I was testing autofocus on but I decided to continue regardless as I was only testing.

The goal for the night was to grab a base image of T Coronae Borealis (“The Blaze Star”) before it goes nova – it’s a reoccurring nova with a 80 year cycle. The star is currently hovering around 10.2 magnitude and it is predicted based on previous eruptions to reach around magnitude 2. As I ultimately wanted to perform some photometry on the star using the UV/IR cut filter I did want to blow out the cores of any bright star so I opted to use the ExtendedFullWell2CMS mode at gain 0, offset 30 with 60 second exposures. During the sequence I forgot to watch HFR/Star count graph and it rose above 5 which meant I have to refocus to (HFR ~2.0) and so due to my oversight due to chatting I will have to dump a lot of the early subs.

At the end of nautical darkness I stopped the sequence and used the NINA flat wizard (dynamic exposure) with the old PegasusAstro 120 flat panel at 100% brightness to create 25 flats and flat darks for a target of 33% ADU. After packing up and the with the pre-dawn temperature hitting 4℃ just before 4am I was looking forward to getting to bed.

At the next clear non-working evening I will attempt to grab some subs again but this time using the correct filter. Thank you to Dave and family for hosting me once more.

NB – NINA 3.1 was formally released the following day (09/06/2024) !

Viewing Report 19th August 2023

20:14 – 23:22

Gingergeek came over this evening with his travel rig to setup and test again before our trip. My travel setup is packed away so instead I will image with the 12″ this evening, the first time since May!

Guiding setup was an issue. I did not need to re-calibrate, however TSX kept guiding on a hot pixel. I realised after a long while this was because there were no bright guide stars in the FOV so used the rotator to find one then everything just worked.

Then had a bug with taking a set of images where the run kept using the blank filter. I added another row in TSX and deleted the original which solved the problem. Cloud came in just after 11pm to shut the dome up.

M15 5 min exposure

Viewing Report 26th May 2023 (M101)

22:47 – 03:15

M101 for me this evening to try and get there RGB data in one night. GingerGeek has come round to test out his travel setup, he has a Takahashi FSQ85, QHY268C and the Pegasus NYX-101 harmonic mount.

Focused at 20,105 on Luminance so RGB will be 21,105

1 x 300s Red

Taking 2 minute exposures for each colour at -25℃. I then realised 5 minutes is so much better. So at 1:30am I then started exposing at 5 minutes with the plan to combine both data sets. The SkyX worked brilliantly as can be seen below, looking after the guiding and image capture.

The main challenge I had early on was the the dome shutting unexpectedly. I will attempt to find out why over the next few months. The camera noise continues to be an issue but less so tonight so I think it may be USB related, again I will troubleshoot and check there cable lengths.

GingerGeek had a productive night troubleshooting a multitude of problems on his untested travel kit and was pleased with the results including taking his first image of a supernova in M101.

Autoguider Troubleshooting 12″ OS

8th April 2023

After a successful morning of Luke helping me rewire the 12″ due to the removal of all computers apart from the Mac Mini, I looked at why the guider kept disconnecting last night and then not calibrating. It transpired to be the length of the USB run. I was hoping through 3 hubs and many meters of cable. On replacing the cable with a shorter one and plugging it into a single hub, the connection error went away. The only thing left to do was test auto guiding at night.

So roll on evening and I went out early to catch the first starts. Luke and I had replaced the All Sky Camera during the day so we wanted to see what that looked like, It is fair to say the ZWO ASI178MC is an amazing upgrade to the rubbish little ZWO ASI120MC I had been using.

New ASC with wider lens

So after much messing about with trying a camera other than the SX Lodestar, trying several pieces of software including PHD2 that I could not get working, I settled on TSX for guiding and managed to get it calibrated. On swapping the side of the mount and recalibrating I had a similar problem, however I think the brightness of the guidestar, along with the exposure time and the order I was doing things in had caused the issue.

Below are the settings used for the working system, note the calibration distance is 30 arcsecs which is fine if you calibrate on a star rather than a hot pixel.

Relay Settings including Direct Guide! 30 arc seconds for calibration distance

Successful calibration East side of mount

Successful calibration West side of mount

Guide Target Method

Settings

X2 Plugin and remove hot pixels

Autoguide tab – long exposure and subframe selected

more settings

Final settings

Success!

So you must select a bright enough star.

You must put a subframe round it.

You must them expose on that subframe.

You must then calibrate that subframe.

Viewing Report 4th April 2023

18:20 – 03:00

Before sunset I wanted to reset the dome parameters in TSX as these had got corrupted since loosing the NUC. I now have a set of working settings.

So I have managed to get the dome rotation working. The settings can be seen here for the OS12 and are documented for the other 2 scopes which are piggybacked in my TOSA manual.

OS 12″ Dome Settings

Skywatcher 120 Esprit Dome Settings

Skywatcher 5″ Dome Settings

Serial Device used for Dome

Unfortunately the night did not produce any images as the last thing I could not get working was guiding, I will take and look tomorrow. The main problem was I could get TSX, PHD2 or a 3rd party piece of software to calibrate the guider.

Imaging Report 15th-16th December 2022

As it was a work night and Dave was working I was imaging from the back garden and not the dark site. I started late in the evening and had issues sorting out the autofocus in NINA which meant I was even later than I had planned.

Using the OptoLong L-Pro filter and the native camera driver (not ASCOM) :

The target was decided by Dave as M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), I decided on 120 second exposures at -15℃, gain 0 and offset 30 (Photographic Mode). I finally started to capture data at 19:55 when M31 had already transited 45 minutes earlier.

M31 single sub (stretched) via NINA Imaging Session

I believe the dark shadow to the left is the QHY OAG prism, I may have to reduce it’s depth in the light path or rotate it 45 degrees so it sits on the long horizontal axis.

Once M31 had reached approximately 50 degrees altitude and was starting to set in the West my guiding started going awry especially in RA. I put this done to either balance issues or cable snagging so that’s something I need to look at in the future.

After shutting down earlier than I thought due to the guiding issue and the pending rising Moon I decided to do my darks, flats and dark flats. However my Pegasus Flatmaster refused to connect to NINA so I decided to fix and complete this task on a different day.

I only managed to capture 62 subs which totals just over 2 hours. I was hoping to get at least 6 hrs for a single session and something approaching > 12 hours which means I will need several more nights to capture my required amount of data for M31.

Not a great first outing but given I hadn’t imaged in ages this was expected. I can honestly say that although a OSC coupled with the new harmonic mounts such as the ZWO AM5/Pegasus Nyx are very convenient as part of a lightweight holiday travel setup. OSC also is easier processing but still I can say I’m not a total fan due to the loss of high frequency data, high HFR focus issues and in the case of the QHY268C the noise banding issue which although appears to be removed by darks etc still is unnerving.

Update (17/12/2022)

Have resolved my Flatmaster 120 panel issues but I feel I’m better off with a fully controllable fixed panel instead of a manual panel so I will look into that.

My Darks, Flats and Dark Flats are now done (25 of each) all performed at -15℃ to match this session temperatures but there is still not enough actual data to start processing.

Viewing Report 4th January 2022

17:53 – 02:34

Clear night! So I’m going to setup and let the dome run all night if it stays clear which is the forecast as I have work tomorrow.

I have run the guiding assistant on PHD2 so that I can hopefully better track objects. The drift in frames from the last time out whilst using the ST80 as a guide scope was less than ideal. I have now put al the new settings suggested into the PHD setup and have swung round to do a focus run on a star near to M32.

After successfully running autofocus in SGP at 23,560 on Luminance I have now slewed to M32 to gather more data that is desperately needed to resolve the outer spiral arms of the companion giant galaxy M31.

So it is now just gone 9pm and whilst the guiding is managing to stop trailing of stars, the image is moving between frames, enough to loose the object over the course of 4-8 hours. This is clearly not good enough and it does look like the focal length of the ST80 is simply not long enough.

To get around the problem this evening I have turned guiding off, as the exposures are short (3 minutes) the trailing of stars is not an issue. At midnight I took flats for M32. I then centred on M78 for the rest of the night. Before starting I performed another focus run as the focus point had changed over the night with the temperature drop.

I choose the same exposure settings and Gain 139 and Offset 21 settings as for M32. -25C was the temperature but this time I rotated the camera by 90 degrees to also fit in NGC 27309.

So I left the scope running and it completed at around 2:30am with 40 frames taken across 4 filters giving me 30 minutes per channel. This will be enough to get started and if clear tonight I will setup for another run at M78 and hopefully improve the guiding.

Update. On reviewing the files this morning it looks like I forgot to select the filter in SGPro which means all my M32 and M78 images from this evening are in fact luminance only! Which is ok for M32 but for M78 I need some colour. Below is the weather data for last night.

Viewing Report 2nd January 2022

19:26 – 01:30

I started with M76 Ha as I need some frame for this object. I already have many hours in OIII. However after starting to image I realised the guiding, which is currently being tested through Dave Boddington’s ST80 was not pointing through the slit correctly as M76 was near the zenith. This means I have suffered from trailing as the guider was trying to guide on long stars due to diffraction.

I swapped to a different object, this time M32 as I have not imaged this directly before, just as a happenstance of imaging M31. I have chosen 180s exposures using Gain 139 Offset 21 to keep the saturation of the core down. At 300s the core was blown out.

M31 can be seen to the left and lower left of the small galaxy. M31 covers a large part of this image! So how well was my guiding doing?

The guiding looked fine. 0.52 arcsecs total error which I am happy with. I stayed up until just before midnight and then left the observatory running. In the morning I noticed the dome shut around 1:30pm due to the images after that looking like flats.

I also noticed this morning that the images were drifting so the guiding is not quite right as the image drifts. I will next time out run the guiding assistant and see if that helps.

Update the image scrubbed up fairly well but I lost a lot of frames to drift and trailed stars and then the dome closing. Resulting image around 3 hours 12 minutes exposure of which 48 mins was Luminance but there was cloud affecting many frames.

Below is a copy of the nights weather data.

Exoplanet HAT-P-32b (14/9/2020) – IMT3

So the evening started well, I had logged into IMT3, got the dome ready, TheSkyX/SGPro software was up and running, CMOS camera was cooled and I was already syncing on a bright star even though it was still twilight.

Dave and I had chatted the previous night and had settled on HAT-P-32b in the constellation of Andromeda. The reason was due to the target position in the sky, the time of rising and setting was before the rise of the sun so we could get a full ingress and egress and no meridian flip was required.

Then the gremlins started to play havoc with our efforts and I was having major issue with guiding to the point that I was going to give up as the issues were eating into the desired 1 hour egress monitoring time period. Dave joined the session to help resolve the issue and we managed to start imaging about 10 minutes before the start of the transit.

Dave had to go to bed due to work commitments but I was determined to get the full set of observation and run it through the HOPS analysis software. It was an uneventful night interspaced with music, movies and hot cups of tea.

Once I had transferred the data over the internet to my server, performed the analysis and sent the result to Dave it was 5:30am so I crawled into bed around 6am.

Exoplanet WASP-93b (1-2/8/2020) – IMT3

Session time 21:00 (1/8) – 03:41 (2/8)

@ 19:00 Opened dome in order to cool the dome and scope down.

@ 21:00 GingerGeek arrives, wine is poured and we took 5 x darks, flats and bias for both the last run and tonight. The flats (red) were 3 seconds exposure to get 2/3 well depth required for this.

@ 21:44 Slewed to WASP-93b before we set about focusing on a nearby magnitude 5 star using the Red filter. Starting focus position was 58841@19.42℃.

@ 22:06 After failing to focus using the Red filter we resorted to using the Luminance filter to auto focus and achieved a excellent fit (focus position 61630, HFR 4.95 @20.83℃).

When we swapped back to the Red filter, SGPro then moved the filter offset to focuser position 60630. We slewed back to WASP-93b (GSC:3261:1703) and found a guide star just off centre of the star field with the exoplanet target.

Started to take exposures to find the brightest value of the centre pixel of the star and make sure it was 2/3 full well depth and thus 33,000 ADU (even though it is a 12-bit camera SGPro is set to 16-bit for ease of use. Eventually this was achieved at around 200 second exposure.

@ 22:51 Started imaging, 18.21℃ was measured at the focuser.

Mars imaging finished at 03:41

Exoplanet WASP-74b (30-31/7/2020) – IMT3

Started around 21:15, Guiding by 22:02, Capture started 22:22, Finished at 03:31.

Dave and I are part of the amateur exoplanet monitoring effort for the ESA Ariel mission. We decided that we would allocate some time to try and provide observing data towards the project whenever we could.

Part of this requires some forward planning such as looking at the upcoming transit visible and their associated time. This is due to the altitude of the object, the ingress and the egress times of the projected transit.

Prior to this we had discussed in advance which object to target for the chosen evening. All the hard work of choosing objects is done by the Exospies project website as they list the candidates they need data for via a schedule. So it’s a simple task for use to go through the list and work out what fits best for us.

Unfortunately whilst opening the dome to cool down I decided to review the schedule but I was hit with a server 500 error from the website. In a panic that I might miss the start of the event I scoured the internet for alternate exoplanet transit time websites and found the excellent Exoplanet Transit Database of the Czech Astronomical Society.

Later on I found https://www.exoworldsspies.com/en/scheduler/ as well which will be useful in the future, especially for looking at past events.

I had issues with focus drift all night due to the temperature fluctuations but at a recent Zoom session it was discussed that images can be out of focus with no detrimental effect on the measurements :

I was unable to auto focus successfully maybe due to the low altitude and seeing. I also discovered that temperature compensation was enabled so we probably need to remeasure the temperature compensation coefficients so the focus deltas are better between the par focal filters.

The object was at a relative low altitude, the outside temperature was warm and although the skies appeared clear our AAG CloudWatcher sensors via the Grafana dashboard told a different story. For us a truly clear sky is anything equal or lower than -18℃.

Sky Temperature – it was clear but it wasn’t !

After performing a meridian flip, resumed the guiding I started to feel tired so I set my alarm for 3am and went to bed. Unfortunately there appeared to be a guiding issue at some point shortly I went to bed.

Guiding issues shortly after meridian flip

This was investigated using the phdLogViewer and shown to be a loss of guide star and didn’t recover for around 18 minutes.

The guiding issue also caused the image to shift so the target and reference stars moved. We need this in frame in order to run the frames through the provided HOPs data analysis program which hopefully won’t have a problem in reading them. That’s an exercise for this weekend and hopefully we will have enough data to yield a decent light curve that we can submit.

Viewing Report 2nd June 2020 – IMT3

20:28 – 00:30

After a day of checking the mount and spending some 3 hours resetting the RA and DEC cam stop and spring plungers I have come out to see if I have resolved the image or made it worse. I can still hear the squeaking of the cables in the Through the mount position as the worm turns so I do need to remove 1 or 2 of them to free it up. However I no longer hear the knocking, tapping and grinding of the Dec axis. I am also going to capture some PEC data for Tom on the Software Bisque forum to look at. GingerGeek with his usual smoking jacket turned up to assist from a distance.

Whilst trying to find a star we came across a galaxy, NGC 5646 H126-1, which looked very interesting for the 12″, so we will come back and image that at a later date. We are in a rush for the clouds as it is to cloud over by 11:30pm. What we need to do is disable PEC, disable TPoint and Protrack and the guider relays then point at a star and guide without applying any corrections as per page 147 of the MEII manual for 15 minutes.

I went out to the dome and set with the help of GingerGeek the camera on the back of the 12″ to as close to 0 degrees as possible, in our case 0.81 degrees after plate solving.

We slewed to a start neat declination 0 and close to the Meridian on the East side of the mount called Tycho 326:747 and at 22:37 started to look at the auto-guider settings. The star was at DEC +01° 34′ 10.909″ and RA 14h 45m 20.1920. The auto-guider log in question for tonight was “Autoguider.018.log”. The star looked good in the main ZWO ASI1600mm camera which we would use to guide and collect the data. We did notice as per the image below over 15 minutes the star drifting East, so the polar alignment is out. More importantly we got the 15 minutes of data in the log as the clouds started to roll in, as can be seen in the star brightness below.

The resulting log file was read into the Sky’s PEC and the raw data shown below one we clicked ‘Fit’ on the data which scales it to this chart. The peak to peak was 0.7 arcsecs. We applied this to the mount –

Next whilst GingerGeek went off to get his beauty sleep…..he really needs it 🙂 I set about slewing to a bright star in the vicinity and calibrating the guider, since I had rotated the camera. The calibration was successful even though the RA looked slights odd as a fit. The different in the RA and Dec rate was potentially due to position on the sky and the error in the RA plotting data. I will go back and do another calibration next time it is clear.

I then slewed to M92, could not find a guide star very suitable so moved around a bit and then started to guide and see what the graph looked like. What surprised me was the the amplitude of the guiding was only 0.36 arcsecs which is really low and no guiding issues as I saw before. It looks like the adjustments to the spring plungers and cam stops may have been the cause and fix.

Guiding graph at +74 deg altitude and near M92

I performed a quick focus run whilst pausing the guiding and got 61836 and HFR 4.4 which is vert good for this scope.

Meanwhile the clouds from the North had started to drift in which was going to stop play 🙁

I managed to get a single frame and focus on M92 of 20s before the clouds stopped the guiding. So I shut up the dome, sent the logs to Software Bisque, or the chap on the forum who was kind enough to help and went off to bed.

Viewing Report 31st May 2020 – IMT3

18:01 – 01:09

Opened dome early to cool down at 6pm.

The first thing to do were Flats for Ha first for the previous night but also for use tonight. I completed this at 22:15

At 22:31 I performed focus run on Luminance which came in at position 59841 with HFR 4.77.

I started an image run as soon as the Pelican Nebula (IC5067) was above the neighbours house. I have set a run of 10 x 600s and 20 x 300s Ha subs guided with the new PHD2 settings to prove the 12″ now works from 1 night to another. Then we can try the Esprit on the next clear night. The guiding at first looked okay.

The resulting image looked very good too

After about 5 frames I suddenly ran into a problem the guiding looked like this

There were large movements in the Dec and the RA would not return to centre. Soon enough SGPro stopped imaging and tried to settle the guider and then further complained about not being able to settle. So I temporarily changed the Hysterisis from 10 to 15 to see if this would get the star back. It did, well just.

The RA axis returns to the centre after quite some time. Is this possibly seeing related or is there something mechanical amiss with the setup?

I did notice the problem one more and then went off to bed left it running 01:09 leaving the possible bump in the worm to resolve itself.

Addendum – So got up this morning and the scope had continued its travel across the heavens. I looked at SGPro and it finished the sequence without any problem. I then looked at PHD2 and expanded the time to include the maximum span possible as it had been trying to guide after loosing the star (I have check boxed Enable Star Mass Detection in the hope this fixes it) and I noticed a problem, which is the recurring South then North oscillation which I now need to investigate as that is the cause of loosing an image due to the star moving. It looks for all the world to be on the worm gear. I will set about measuring the PEC tonight and see if I can see it. It may of course be from when I adjusted the work due to another problem I had and it may not be quite right. I will also ask on the forum.

Viewing Report 30th May 2020 – IMT3

5pm – 3:19am

I opened the dome at 5pm. I wanted to try tonight to sort guiding via PHD2 again on the 12″ this evening and then on Esprit120 if enough time allowed.

I changed the PHD2 Profile for 12″ from 6 calibration steps to 12. Performed calibration. Started test guiding in West at +47 Alt. Tried 300 seconds exposure x2 all good

I Slewed back to the East and to Pelican Nebula. Set the Reverse Dec Output After Meridian Flip tick box again ! It then re-calibrated for this side of the mount.

I have also changed the assume Dec orthogonal to the RA axis.

I reran the calibration a number of times until there was no longer an error at the end of the calibration. There was also trailing of stars. Some of the problem seems to have been an incorrect calibration, we need the RA and DEC rates to be very close indeed. Some of ours this evening were 1.5 arcsec difference. The good calibration we finally settled on was 0.5 arcsec difference. The other change was I went out and tightened up the grub screw holding the Lodestar guider on the prism tube that goes into the OAG body, this was loose and I could move the back end of the guider around. This was due to changing the OAG position recently and clearly not tightening the grub screw in enough.

I then refocused on Lum and then switched to Ha. This is the image after 300s with a much better HFR of 5.21

Pelican 300s in focus with no trailed stars

When I had a bump in the seeing (assumed) the PHD2 graph looked like this

the resulting image of 300s I was in the middle of looked like this :

Image effected by seeing and bump in PHD2 graph

and zoomed in you can see the problem.

Watching Chris Woodhouse’s excellent YouTube video on PHD2 guiding he has also set the min star size to stop it picking up a hot pixel, something we have seen this evening. He has also disabled Star Mass Detection, which stops PHD restarting if it if it thinks another star has been picked even though it may not have, both of these under the brain and guiding tab.

Minimum star HFD and Star Mass Detection changes

It’s now 2:51am, the sky is brightening but the seeing has settled, the mount is behaving and I am taking 600s Ha images of the Pelican Nebula without any trailing of stars. The odd spike sees a jump up to 3 arcsecs occasionally.

The guiding graph below shows a really good small RMS below 1 which is key.

So by 3:19am the sky is really getting bright and showing on the SQM as 18.6 and dropping fast. I have stopped guiding and imaging and will now head to bed. The final focus position for Ha was 59925 so I can grab flats tomorrow! I will then take a look at the Esprit120 tomorrow night.

Viewing Report 29th May 2020 – IMT3

21:05 -2:56am

Currently cooling dome since 8pm.

Logged in at 22:43 to slew to Pelican IC 5067

Esprit 120 FHR was 1.99 for Lum and 2.54 on the Ha

Focused on Deneb , 30 seconds exposure produced HFR 2.23

Solve and sync completed on Deneb in Ha

The focus point for Ha was 6217

Now for a quick frame and focus, 30 seconds exposure

30 seconds Ha on Pelican as Frame and Focus test

That looked good, next up was to see if we can image for 5 minutes unguided and see what the resulting image looked like

Again the resulting image looked very good and no star trails

Clear skies with -18℃ measured by the Infrared sensor on the AAG Cloud-Watcher.

AAG Infrared sensor read -18c so zero clouds

I then tried a 10min image but got clear trailing.

So I set the guiding up with PHD2, went out to the dome and created a dark library as this was not done. I then set about training the guider and then set it running, initially with a 4 second exposure. The resulting guide graph looked a bit bumpy. The ASC looked very clear this evening which was the first time in a while. You could see stars to the left hand edge of the image which is normally obscured by cloud.

We decided to run the guiding assistant in PHD2 and see if there were any changes that needed to be made. It came up with some suggestions including redoing the calibration and changing the calibration step size from 1600 to allow more steps in the calibration, in this case I changed to 1200 to try and go from 3 steps per axis to 8, however I got to 6 steps and this seemed good enough. When I then reran the guiding assistant I no long got the error about calibration. I did have a few suggestions as seen below which I applied.

So the changes made still have not allowed 10mins images, they are still trailed. So that I do not waste any further time this evening I captured 5 minute images instead of 10 minutes and I will relook at the guiding next week when the Moon get brigheter.

At 1:38 we gave up on guiding and switched to 12″, Autofocus on Lum, 63384 HFR 5.4. Took some 5 minute and a single 10 minute frame guided, scope trailing ?

There were three scopes on the Pelican Nebula (IC5070/IC5067) tonight as GingerGeek was imaging with the Tak FSQ85 from his back garden.

Finished to go to bed at 2:56 am, GingerGeek finished the session by taking flats, warming up the CCD and bringing the scope indoors just after 3am.

Rough stack of Ha (5nm) 10×600 seconds, -15℃ From the FSQ85

Viewing Report 26th May 2020 – IMT3

21:00 – 00:46

Opened dome at 4pm to start cooling the 12″, but actually started to play by looking at guider on the 12″ at 9pm. The guider had never really produced round stars and I suspected this was due to it not being pushed all the way in, far enough to be in the sweet spot for focus.

So I took off and adjusted with a spacer of which I had many in different thicknesses. I found the ideal one to fit that would allow the filter wheel Now round stars. Given high cloud I have set running on M5 LRGB, 60 x 60 seconds L / 30 x 60s RGB. Not guiding. Gain 139 Offset 21. Cooler -15. to rotate far enough that it did not fowl the guide camera, which until now it had. Now this was done, it was time to test.

The images were much better, the stars tight and round. I also changed the rotation of the guider so that its chip was square to the rectangular whole in the light pickoff shaft.

So now that was achieved I went off to image M5, but without the guider as I could not find a guide star……..typical. I chose M5 as we have some frames from a previous night in May but focus was not as good as tonight and the ADU was too high. I left the scope running 60 x Luminance and 30 x RGB and went to bed.

Addendum. The dome shut when the Sun started to rise which is fantastic and working as designed. What is not is the AAG must have hung and although I could see in Windows Task Manager it was nowhere to be seen, not in the icon tray or open as a window. Also I forgot to keep the dome log open in TSX so could not see the time stamp of closure. I will have a check list for the next night out. Also I now realise the pick off mirror obscuring the corner of the camera chip for the main camera so I need to either move where the light is picked off from or move the mirror out slightly without effecting the focus.

OAG Pick off mirror obscuring main camera in corner

I have also now started to process the image and on close inspection to the frames I can see the cloud moving across in the Red channel. Here is the results for the processed image.

Viewing Report 15th May 2020 – IMT3

21:58 – 02:02

Just setting up for an imaging run and to test imaging without temp compensation to see if the 12″ keeps focus without it. I started by myself then was joining by GingerGeek and then Bob.

Performed a SGPro autofocus run on Mag 7 star produced focus position of 71,828 @ 4.6 HFR at 14.47℃.

Resulting M98 image from 1st autofocus run

The resulting image was good with good star shapes. Although I suspected at this point the seeing was not excellent.

I let the sequence run for a bit imaging M98 through LRGB and then decided the HFR was gradually getting larger so I performed a 2nd Autofocus run which came in at position 72,215 HFR 5.7 at 13.97℃.

Again I let the sequence continue for at least 4 images and the performed another Autofocus run, note all the time this was on M98 and not slewing away to another star. This came in at focus position 72,697 @HFR 5.7 at 13.82℃.

I continued this routine again and performed another Autofocus run on M98 focus position 73,441 HFR 5.4 at 12.98℃.

I then decided, due to struggling to get a good HFR on focus runs to see if the autofocus was introducing an issue so I changed the autofocus setting from 9 data points to 11 data points to try and get fuller deeper curve. The resulting curve was better and more complete on both sides of the U shape. I then imaged further and then attempted an autofocus with the settings change for the step size from 2500 to 1500 and data points from 11 to 15. This was because I felt we always have a flatfish bottom to the autofocus which at this focal length of 2.5m shows the quality of the seeing with a narrower flat bottom being better seeing. The new autofocus came in at position 73,534 HFR 5.1 at 12.66℃. Meanwhile we kept noticing satellites going across the ASC which I now believe are potentially StarLink so very annoying.

The new autofocus settings seem to work better. Anything less than 1500 step size would be less than the seeing, as proved tonight so I may find that 2000 is ideal, a test for another night. Also noted that Red filter was showing the worst HFR changes due to seeing and humidity was around 75%, again worthy of note to see how good the seeing is. The guiding was all over the place tonight, again another indicator of poor seeing. So all these things are not poor setup or poor software but poor seeing!

This I believe was the ISS going over captured in the ASC.

I was really pleased GingerGeek and I had spent time a week or so ago when the Moon was around working out the location of the Field of View (FoV) indicator on TSX, it makes it much easier to find a guide star, although tonight M98 had a couple strategically placed which was great.

FoV for Off Axis Guider and the OS main camera

By 2pm the cloud had started to appear, first at South Winston with Steve’s setup, then at Mil Dave’s at Tadley and finally here some 15 minutes later. The guide star was lost by PHD and SGPro in a well ordered fashion did what it is really good at and stopped imaging.

SGPro can’t continue imaging due to guide star loss 🙂

Here is where I got up to so LRGB on M98 for the night with 15 x Luminance and 12 x Red, Green and Blue was the original first image for each was there wrong exposure time, so RGB at 2mins and Luminance at 5mins. Very happy for an evening testing and gathering data at the same time.

Here is a set of image statistics charts for each filter for the HFR changing over the evening whilst I refocused. Next time I will focus once and not refocus and see what happens with the temperature drop.

Final look at the AAG weather station as the cloud sensor which is Infrared makes the dome unsafe and shuts it.

Here is the final view from the ASC

and of course to finish the evening off another satellite!

Viewing Report – Cinco de Mayo 2020

Moon 96% Waning.

Our TOSA Manual needs updating now that we have replaced the HiTechAstro Deluxe Cloud Sensor with the Lunático AAG CloudWatcher cloud detector.

New Screens to get familiar with:

Initially I was unable to open the shutter of the dome. Thinking I’d forgotten to reset the HiTechAstro relay I soon realised I had to figure out why the AAG_Cloudwatcher software was reporting Unsafe. GingerGeek spotted that the Brightness level looked like a sawtooth and should settle after a few minutes, which it appeared to do and the dome shutter opened successfully.

Following on from my previous observing session on 1st May when clouds interrupted play just as I was completing a Guiding Assistant run in PHD2, I started tonight’s session with a quick look at Venus before it set below our horizon and then had another go at running the Guiding Assistant in PHD2 for the OS 12″ / Tak FS-102 combination, with the Tak as the guider for the Officina Stellare.

Venus in Ha (because it’s so bright).

Crop

As the Tak has an Alnitak Flip Flat attached to it I added it to the profile I’ve created for the OS12 and Tak combination so that the panel can be opened to allow light through to the camera 🙂

Guiding Assistant completed successfully and values applied for RA MnMo, Dec MnMo and Dec Backlash compensation.

Y scale = 2, Target Radius = 1.5

Sequence running for 2, 5, 7, 10, 12 and 15minutes.

2, 5,& 7 minutes exposures ok but trailing beginning to show at 10 minutes, quite evident at 12 minutes and very evident at 15 minutes.

Added 8 and 9 minutes to sequence, but both of these show signs of stars trailing.

Started a sequence of 24 x 5 minute exposures.

Aborted at frame 20 as the NGC3628 was now below the horizon.

The image has drifted and NGC 3628 has not remained fixed in the frame, so we still have issues with guiding as that is almost certainly the source of the drift.

02:22 Slew to M5, just off centre.

Slew to HIP 74975 to centre and focus.

De-selected guider.

02:57 Slewed to M5 and started a sequence of 24 x Lum and 8 x R,G,B 120s frames.

Sample Luminance frame:

04:08 SQM graph has started to droop. Was 18.2 before 4am, now down to 18

04:10 ASC image brightening quickly

04:15 SQM 17.54

04:24 Camera Warming Up

Disconnected Guider

Telescope Parked and disconnected.

Dome Parked (shutter closed) and disconnected

De-humidifier on.

Camera Power Off

04:30 I’m off to bed

Viewing Report 2nd May 2020 – IMT3

22:00 – 23:59

This evening GingerGeek and I simply set out to align the off axis guider of the OS on TSX. We did this buy focusing on the Moon and adjusting the off axis guider for he crater we were seeing. The resulting image is not very good which give rise to a though that the OAG should move it’s position in the imaging train to give better star renditions, the issue is I think it is as far back as it can go due to the filter wheel.

Viewing Report 1st May 2020 – IMT3

On opening the dome I slewed to Venus hoping to catch it before it disappeared below the horizon. I took a 1s Frame and Focus image just to confirm it was in the centre of the FoV and was puzzled by the resulting image.

At first I thought the 12″ was still covered so called Dave to check. He didn’t think the cover was in place as the last thing he’d done was to take some Flats. Dave confirmed that the cover was not in place but reported that I might be trying to view Venus through the trellis on the fence so I abandoned Venus and slewed to NGC3628 in Leo as it had just crossed the Meridian and I wanted to try and setup a profile to use my Tak FS-102 as a guide scope for Dave’s OS12″.

Previous attempts at guiding the OS with the QHY5 and MiniGuideScope combination had proved worse than imaging with the mount unguided.

Although I suspected we knew the root cause we hadn’t our research 🙁 which soon became apparent. I found a couple of rules of thumb, the first stated that ‘image scale in arc-seconds x 400 = max exposure time is seconds when guiding with a separate guide scope’.

For the ZWO ASI1600MM (3.8um pixel size) on the OS 12″ (2500mm fl)

((3.8/2500) x 206.265) x 400 = 125s

We can do better than that unguided.

The second ‘rule of thumb’ I found stated that the ‘Guide to Main train pixel ratio should not exceed 10:1.

Unfortunately the QHY5 MiniGuideScope to OS12″ ratio is close to 17.8:1, not good.

The QHY5 + MiniGuideScope scale is (3.75/130) x 206.265 = 5.95 arc-sec / pixel.

The OS 12″ + ZWO ASI1600MM scale is (3.8/2500) x 206.265 = 0.31 arc-sec/pixel.

The Tak FS-102 with the QHY168C scale is (3.75/820) x 206.265 = 0.94 arc-sec/pixel

So if we try the OS 12″ with the Tak as the guide scope the ratio is closer to 2.8:1 which sounds like a better proposition.

to be continued …