IMT3 – Page 5 – IMT3b Observatory

Viewing Report 23rd/24th August 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 22:34 – 0

Looking at Vega ready for setting up guide scope

GingerGeek round tonight to align his guide scope, focus it and make sure guiding works. The first thing we had to do though was unplug my camera and then plug his into the Mount Hub Pro due the fuse problem from the last session when it melted through the fuse holder, that will be fixed later this weekend.

Next we slewed to Vega as seen above and took a quick image to see how far out the Esprit 120 is compared to where the OS12″ is pointing so that we can adjust it later.

So it would seem focusing was a bit more of a challenge than we thought. The first thing is we bought an adapter for the guide scope (aka the finder that came with the Esprit 120) but it did not provide enough back focus for the camera. We had a look round the adapters in the dome and found a nose extension for the Lodestar, however it was not a c-mount end to it so we landed up duck taping it on tonight until GingerGeek can bring round his adapter.

The next challenge was not seeing any stars in the lodestar, after what seemed like a long while we came to the conclusion that the picture we were looking at on the screen in PHD2 was not the camera we thought, it was instead the one from the OS12″ which at this point was not pointing through the slit.

After looking through the settings on PHD2 we found a new setting we had not seen before, which seemed to be because we have multiple ASCOM cameras connected.

The symbol is a double arrow and when clicked a drop down list of 4 Starlight Xpress cameras appeared, so we chose the 4th one which was one of the two Lodestars and that worked.

I then adjusted the guide scope in its two ring holders and aligned close to Vega which we had slewed to. Now the guide scope was spot on and the main scope ever so slightly off. This will be solved when we either shim the scope to align with the OS12″ or when we add/change the way in which it is connected to the losmandy mounting plate.

By 12:40am we had the focus sorted for the guide scope and we moved back in doors to connect back to the 2 cameras for this evening, lodestar and main imaging camera and then the Lakeside focuser to start an autofocus run on the main camera.

At 1:20am we were still trying to focus as we had not setup the autofocus routing for the Esprit 120 before, the OS12″ is now fine but this was a new challenge. GingerGeek spend an appreciable amount of time changing the step size and other settings in SGPro to effect the focus routine. Finally autofocus did a great job and we landed up at a focus point of 6225 for the Luminance filter. However there was an amount of backlash and this caused the focus point to not be the same in a one direction. GingerGeek needs to find out where he wrote down the figure we measured for backlash so we can add in.

Good auto focus achieved but with slight error

Next we slewed to the star near the Elephant Trunk, SAO 33570 and changed the filter to Ha. GingerGeek then started an auto focus run for this filter. As it was now late we were missing setting simple things such as the exposure time increase from 1s to 15s needed to actually register any stars to focus on.

Once focused (ish) as we are tired now, we started a short test image run of 10mins subs for the Ha. GingerGeek showed me the Big Status window which is a much nicer interface to your image progress.

We then had a problem with guiding, there were inconsistent rates between the RA and DEC axis. This caused trailing of stars so we stopped the guiding, however the next image although still out of focus showed promise especially given we were not guiding.

10min unguided Ha Esprit 120 (out of focus)

So 3:24am and time for bed.

Viewing Report 10th/11th August 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 21:04 – 04:28

So whilst the wind is blowing a gale and branches have come down off of 300 year old oaks where I live, the weather decided to ease as we went into the evening. There were still gusts of high wind but nothing really to be too concerned about for the dome.

Due to more changes on the mount and the polar alignment changes I needed to do a new TPoint run. I first tried to complete a recalibration run that would add additional data, however after a 30 point run the pointing got worse to the point where I was not landing up on the object but several fields of view. So I bit the bullet and deleted the recalibration data and the original model and started again.

It took me about 1.5 hours to run 30 points on the East side of the mount and another 1.5 hours to run the next 30 on the West. I was happy with the results and I turned on some new Terms as I went through. As you select the term you can see the resulting change to the position of the telescope. So rightly or wrongly I used this process a few times when the pointing was either not improving or it just needed to improve a little.

I also created a Supermodel of the data and once again enabled Protrack. I then went to my usual target of the Elephant Trunk to try and get use to pointing to the right object and then imaging it from SGPro. I decided the easiest thing was to use The SkyX to move to the object as I knew I wanted to be centred on SAO 33570 a star in the trunk. I did this and with my new pointing capability since this evenings TPointing, the scope landed up pointing at pretty much the right area. So instead of Sync and Solve I left it at this location for tonight.

The Polar Alignment report produced by TPoint on this new 60 point model showed very little error in either RA or DEC which is a testament to the long hours I put in drift aligning the mount.

At 2:04 am I then tried to cool the camera but it was non responsive……..this threw me for a while then I remembered the other evening having this same problem which probably meant the camera power was not on.I went into the dome to find that was the case and the reason once again was the fuse on the Mount Hub Pro had melted. I cut this off and put a chocky block in for this evening to bypass the fuse, but I did unplug everything else from the mount hub pro whilst there was no fuse there.

Whilst doing this I was reintroduced to nature with a Hornet the size of my thumb bouncing around in the dome. After quickly removing myself from the dome I cam back armed with an insecticide and sprayed the offending hornet. It kealed over and died quickly.

Next I focused and this worked very well, a nice V curve on the Luminance and then I switched to Ha for the imaging, This would be slightly out but I need to find a strong HA source of stars to be able to focus with Ha.

Once again I ran the Image Sequencer to see if this would work given I had made some changes suggested by my good friend Mil Dave to the guider settings in PHD2 and SGPro. However once again I was foiled with some new error messages, I am either getting use to this or possibly very fed up, SGPro may be a great piece of software from a functionality perspective, but it is complex, unintuitive and a pain. The error complained about the PHD2 profile ‘OS 12 Lodestar Guider’ is not valid.

This is indeed my profile and is valid so not sure about this, another thing to investigate when I am not so tired. The follow on message was Could not start the autoguider and connect to the equipment so aborting. This is to be expected.

So I went back to Frame and Focus and too a single 5min shot, guiding on a good star that was in the FoV of the Lodestar off-axis guider. I took a 10min image and then a 20min image.

Looking at the TPoint model there was a nice improvement for where I started with a with an RMS, Root Mean Square of 100 so when pointing the object I am targeting will be within 100 arc seconds of the centre of the CMOS chip, so 1.7 arc minutes, whereas now it is leas than 1 arc minutes out at 57.9.

I then went back to SGPro to try and fix this error as I don’t like giving up. I changed more settings within SGPRo and PHD2 around the error size for the guider to settle, however SGPro was still waiting for PHD to report it had settled even though it was now guiding.

Error message

I turned off both the Settle At and the Settle Auto Guider check boxes. This then allowed me to bypass the whole settling thing which wis is really not that important to me as I manually setup guiding first and now the sequence has started at last!

Finally the guider looks very smooth and the only thing now stopping me from taking some more images is the fact it is 4:28am and I am very tired and it is getting light. So I will disconnect and shut down until the next clear night at a weekend. All in all a very productive night.

Viewing Report 5th/6th August 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 22:17 – 01:04

Configuring the guider to work with DirectGuide was tonights job, it was so important I have created a separate blog for it. That took the majority of this session before I really did need to go to bed for work tomorrow.

Once setup and now having the ability to reliably guide without the need for an ST-4 cable, I went to take a quick photo again to test the stability of the system. The importance of DirectGuide is worth labouring here as given we have 3 scopes to guide from, there is only 1 ST-4 port. We did not want to keep plugging in and unplugging the different cables, more did we want to build a bespoke connector for all 3, so DirectGuiding is really the only way this would work.

Once complete I once again tried to slew to the exact area for the Elephant Trunk, this has been problematic due to not quite getting sync and solve working, it works sometimes, and locating a star that I can reliably use. I have noted now that HD 205850 in Sky Safari and SAO 33570 in the SkyX represent the pair of stars in the main section of the trunk. I also took another frame nearby to label for future reference.

SAO 33570 centre of Elephant Trunk and SAO 33573 end of the Trunk

Unfortunately Sync and solve failed and landed up moving the scope to the wrong area, hence I missed the object when trying a longer exposure with the Ha filter. I need to reliably get sync and solve working to be able to use SGPro else I will have to go back to The Sky X that I have used before for image capture which I would prefer not to do given the flexibility of SGPro.

So I landed up pointing at a star UCAC4 739:73701 which was an offset frame from where I needed to be, the purple oblong representing the FoV of where I should have been and the UCAC star showing where I landed up.

SGPro did error as mentioned during Sync and Solve as can be seen in the screen grab below. I will talk with GingerGeek to resolve.

DirectGuide and the Paramount ME II

So I used to be able to guide on the Paramount ME without the need for an ST-4 guider cable. This is achieved through information being shared about the position of the star to PHD2 and it then sending commands to the relays on the Paramount ME, however I had yet to be able to get this working with the Paramount ME II and using SGPro as the host program.

So for a short period on the evening of 5^th August 2019 I ventured out to complete the setup and get the guider working.

As information is key I had spent time re-reading pieces of the Paramount User Manual, The Sky X Manual and the PHD2 Manual, the later having partial information needed to setup, another piece of information was in The Sky X Manual.

So what did I do? Well DirectGuide is a bit like Pulse guiding that is supported on other mounts, however for the Paramount ME II pulse guiding is NOT supported. So you need to configure and setup for Direct Guide, but where?

Looking at the Connect Equipment window in PHD2 you are presented with 3 options, How to connect the camera, how to connect the mount and a 3rd option around how to connect an Aux mount. It is important to understand when to use that 3rd option around Aux mount as that is what can cause confusion when trying to get Direct Guiding to work.

Aux Mount should only be chosen if you are using an ST-4 cable, if you are not then this option should remain set to None. If you inadvertently select ASCOM Telescope Driver for The Sky within this box the mount will not behave correctly. So leave it set to None!

Camera needs to be set for the camera of choice, for me my trusty Starlight Xpress Lodestar is selected. For the Mount I selected ASCOM Telescope Driver for The Sky. Next you need to configure the Mount by clicking on the spanner and screwdriver icon next to the option.

Under here you can configure The Sky Controller Driver Setup, selecting The Sky version, X Pro for me and various options for the mount itself. The key checkbox is Use DirectGuide. This menu of options is from the ASCOM Chooser and you should select any settings you wish to enable. Mine can be seen below.

ASCOM Chooser for Mount and DirectGuide setting

I quickly configured the Camera also and below are the settings that work well.

On connecting to both the camera and mount, selecting a guide star and calibrating the guider it is apparent that I have configured the setup correctly. All is now well with the guiding and it produces a smooth chart with tonights seeing as can be seen after several dips produced by cloud at the begging of the guider graph.

Viewing Report 3rd/4th August 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 19:21 – 02:57

An unexpected clear spell this evening, I was sitting out on the patio looking at the clouds clearing and so setup the dome to perform the Periodic Error Correction (PEC) analysis for the mount.

To perform this I needed to unplug the hand controller for the MEII, unplug the ST4 guider cable, turn off a bunch of settings within the autoguider software with The SKY X (TSX) and also turn off TPoint.

I then connected the ZWO ASI1600MM to TSX rather than SGPro. This was so that I could record the log needed for the PEC through the autoguider add on software which records in a format that the PEC software requires. The challenge again was that I could not get the ZWO camera to connect in TSX. I just kept getting error 200. Searching TSX forum I finally found the issue and downloaded the latest driver from ZWO but through the link from Software Bisque. To install I needed to log in as Admin.

So I started to record the star movement without performing any guiding. Once done I imported the log file Autoguider.010.log into the PEC portion of TSX.

I then performed a fit so that you could see the sinusoidal waves before I then fitted the correction to it. A quick look using PHD2 Drift Alignment to see what the drift now was, was very promising with a sinusoidal wave over 10-15 minutes.

I then went off and tried to image unguided to see if it made a difference, it had, I recorded a 10min unguided image through the 12″ 2.5m focal length scope with no trailing of Altair.

I then attempted to slew and take an image of the Elephant Trunk in Ha again, however I was foiled by not only the cloud moving in but also not being able to get past the message Guider Settling. I need to talk through with GingerGeek to see why that is. Meanwhile bedtime for Mr Shave-Wall.

Viewing Report 2nd/3rd August 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 22:07 – 04:23

Another evening commissioning the observatory, so tonight was about further refinement of the polar alignment. The main thing was to drift align with PHD again, but this time I would follow the instructions more carefully.

First I had to find a star near the celestial equator which was easier said than done. I little research showed me how to turn on the celestial equator line in The Sky X (TSX), which was essentially a database entry you enable that draws the line across the sphere of the sky using multiple points. The celestial equator is such a line running from East to West passing through the Meridian at an altitude of zero degrees. There were 3 databases to enable in TSX to create the visual effect.

I then selected a star on this imaginary line and near the Meridian, the reason for this is that it would display the most movement and thus magnify the error of miss polar alignment.

Star near celestial equator and meridian

Next I performed an autofocus using the Luminance filter this worked well.

Rasalhauge was the star I choose for drift aligning the first part, a 5 second image within Frame and Focus in SGPro showed it spot on in the middle of the chip once I did a Slew and Solve.

Now I needed to find a guide star nearby and place in the Lodestar FoV. This is routinely easy to do with the FoV displays I have placed on TSX.

The first thing to measure was the azimuth polar error and ignoring the RA line ALWAYS, I followed the Dec line and saw it was out by -1.14 and 75px) I adjusted the thruster knobs on the MEII to move the star to the outset edge of the purple circle showing the error. It is a 50/50 guess if you go the right way with the thrusters.

I then drifted again and of course realised I had indeed gone the wrong way as can be seen by the steeper DEC red line and the much larger purple circle.

The graph on PHD2 can start to look fairly flat, so if you want to review the finer data underlying the straight line you can adjust the scale on the axis.

After getting the line fairly straight I then went on to drift align for the error in altitude. This time selecting a star in the West and near the celestial equator I chose Unukalhai in Serpens Caput.

Once again I watched the DEC line only and ignored the RA, the DEC line this time reflecting the error in altitude. I then adjusted the mount using the altitude adjustment spanner moving the star again to the outside of the purple circle and then retested, finally getting the error down to a suitably small number. It was now 3am some 5 hours after I started!

With now great polar alignment I thought I would attempt an image so wanted to slew to the Elephant Trunk again, IC1396. I performed a slew then plate solved. Of course the centre off the Elephant Trunk is actually the centre of the open cluster which IC1396 represents. I then moved manually to where I knew the nebula to be.

Unfortunately at this point I found that guiding, as despite unguided exposures now being a very real possibility, was not working, I could guide East and West but not North and South. I tried multiple settings but by 4am gave up and called it a night. The following day I would test during daylight and realise there was a setting that needed changing in PHD within the profile itself and upon correcting this guiding would then work the following evening.

Viewing Report 20th/21st July 2019 – IMT3 Observatory & Travel Scope

Viewing time period – 21:15 – 02:15

There were two things I wanted to do tonight, one was to get first light with GingerGeek through the Skywatcher Esprit 120ED, the other was to setup my Esprit 120 on the MyT in the garden and grab a photo of the Moon to celebrate 50 years since Neil and Buzz stepped out onto the lunar surface. As a bonus I wanted to to get the guiding working on the MyT too.

As GingerGeek opened the dome on the IMT3 I setup the portable gear on the patio. I connected the setup to a 12V car battery to see how well it did at running the Mount and the camera. The initial voltage of the battery was 13.1v when I started. I connected the camera to EZCap and the Mount to TheSkyX (TSX).

Meanwhile GingerGeek opened the dome, connected the mount, opened the very geeky but cool Flip Flap covering the Esprit 120 and slewed to a bright star for deterring the focus and the position relative to the 12″ main scope.

Remarkably the focus was fairly near and after a few iterations GingerGeek managed to get the V curve sorted for good focus. Before this was done he setup the Luminance filter on the filter wheel control with SGPro that had not been configured. I then looked at the resulting image and determined the FoV within TSX. The field almost fits the 12″ and so the position is fairly close, close enough for solving and being in the right area for imaging. There was an error by SGPro complaining about 800px difference with what was to be expected, the problem being the difference in the angle of the Esprit 120 vs where the mount knows it is pointing as shown through the 12″.

Despite that we managed to take an image and then move on to see if we could guide with the 12″ off-axis guider for the Esprit. This worked a little but the guider graph was way off at various points, I believe this is potentially either a setup issue on the guider and/or the fact that we are too frequently taking too many images to correct and thus chasing the seeing. I will look at this next time are out.

Back on the portable setup, I managed to very quickly connect, perform polar alignment using the PoleMaster and the new bracket I fitted. I then slewed to a star which was not quite in the FoV so I need to spend more time on this next time I am out. No problems though, I nudged the scope and found the star. Performing a sync on this solved any further slewing problems.

I then waited for the Moon to come up over the roof tops which was unfortunately not until 2am of the 21^st thus slightly missing the landing date of 20th by 2 hours (Eagle landed at 9:17pm BST) but non the less still obtaining an image of the Moon to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the first lunar landing at the time Neil put that famous foot on the Moon at 1:56am BST on the 21^st July 1969 🙂

GingerGeek managed to get a few images but nothing much was showing on them especially the Elephant Trunk nebula he was imaging, I suspect, but am not sure, the wrong filter was selected so probably OIII rather than Ha as a previous Frame and Focus command through SGPro for 15 seconds showed the Elephant Trunk, at this point we were taking 10 minute exposures so it should have easily been visible. Again another problem to sort next time we are out.

Viewing Report 15th July 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 21:32 – 23:48

Tonight was about taking 5 and 10min guided Ha exposures on the Elephant Trunk, IC1396. Even though the Moon is 99% full I wanted to see what the resulting star shape was now we have guiding in place.

As usual the first thing to do was open the dome, Find home on the mount and then slew to a nearby star, sync and then slew to the Elephant Trunk. The operators manual has been updated to the following but I noticed an error in that opening the dome profile disconnects the mount so I will modify the instructions. I also changed the setting for moving the telescope manually within TSX to swap the arrow keys around, this affords a much more natural experience when having to manually move the scope for one reason or another.

I then checked through Sharpcap that the shutter was open and the scope pointing through it using 3 different cameras.

I then took a single frame through the Ha filter to see if I was in the right position.

I measured this against the known star pattern in TSX and then using SkySafari on my iPhone I positioned the FoV to include the front of the trunk in the camera and then manually moved the equivalent FoV indicator in TSX to match the star pattern.

SkySafari iPhone, inner square FoV for 12″

Once they were matched I decided not to go through the whole refocus this evening as the Moon would ruin any image I took, instead I checked the star tightness of focus using the HFD function in SGPro. The resulting star sizes were fine for this evening even though I was focused through the luminance filter before at position 71290. Stars are always more bloated through narrow band filters anyway.

I then moved to opening PHD2 within SGPro and selecting a guide star, although I did have to move the image slightly to find one tonight, again bright Moon.

GingerGeek and Bob were online and GingerGeek offered advice around switching on the environmental monitor that I had forgot about. This would pull data in from the HiTech Weatherstation to add to each image.

I then upped the exposure to 120 seconds, that worked well, nice round stars, then 300 seconds, again tight stars, then I took 3 images at 600 seconds. The background by this point was getting brighter due to the Moon. I had the camera (ASI1600MM) set to -20℃ below the ambient of 14℃ and it was running as can be seen below at 55%. All the images were take with Frame and Focus. GingerGeek then took over and showed me how to use Sequence and we ran into another problem. It would not let us run a sequence, it would error and complain about not being able to connect to the observatory.

A quick Google showed this to be a bug in SGPro, still not fixed and needing to be brought the their attention. We had originally setup the dome to rotate within SGPro, found it not very easy or very good, moved to TSX to control the dome which was easier and much better and unselected within SGPro, However because we had checkboxes ticked that the dome should be rotated in line with the mount pointing it was complaining, even though we explicitly said no dome attached. So unticking this setting worked, although we inadvertently then hung SGPro as it went to perform a focus run, I did not want it to do that, on hitting abort that hung SGPro. We needed to approach Taks Manager to resolve that.

So that was that and I then awoke this morning to pull the files down using the transfer function within Teamviewer. There are 2 was to do this, the other way , not documented here does not allow for field over 25MB to be sent, however selecting File Transfer from the pages icon at the top does.

So what does a single 10min uncalibrated frame with nearly a full Moon look like?

And we have to remember this has not been calibrated, so not Darks, no Flats, for sure no Bias and no processing apart from a stretch to visualise the data. It is pretty smooth as a first light image! So what do 3 of these look like stacked?

Wow, I actually think this is going to be a cracking setup. Again no pre-processing, clearly there are doughnuts to be removed from a flat which is no big deal, well apart from I need to install the A2 flat sheet I have in the dome and in a position the scope can see. Also I will move the end of the nose of the trunk further toward the bottom to get more nebula in. So a good first light test. Now we can test the Esprit 120 ED with the SX814 on the next night. Goodnight zzzzz ……

Viewing Report 14th July 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 20:29 – 23:13

This evening GingerGeek and I are going to try and get the guider in focus again. I hope we can do this so I can use the observatory remotely shortly.

On connecting to the observatory I noticed once again that after running the ZWO120MC for a while under ASICAP it went black. I have still not had a reply on the forum and it reminds me not to buy another ZWO as they are particularly bad at support.

That said there are a few things we need to try including taking the 10m USB extension out of the equation. Once I started TheSkyX and SGPro and PHD etc I could see Vega in the image for the 12″. Moving it to the centre and syncing for the moment manually until GingerGeek shows me how to sync and solve with SGPro. The final part here was moving the scope so that Vega was now in the centre of the FoV of the guider square on TheSkyX.

So Mark arrived to help focus the guider whilst I looked at the screen on PHD. Before we started Bob remotely once again turned the USB power off to the All Sky Cam to reset it using Node Red. That worked so we had that camera working again.

PHD showed a very bright white screen, we had to wait over another hour for the sky to taken enough to be able to make anything out. Once we could, all we saw was the edge of the dome again.

It took GingerGeek a while fiddling with the focus to realise the camera on the screen was not the guider! It transpired PHD had for whatever reason picked up the other webcam mounted on one of the OTAs. No wonder we had problems.

Selecting the SX Lodestar guider from the down list in PHD brought up a picture with Vega in it! From there we had a flat topped star as Vega is too bright for the guider. So we slewed to another star nearby (mag +8) and then refined the focus on that. Next we calibrated the guider again as we had been removing and turning the guide camera.

Once done we then slewed to a star near the Meridian to test output of drift align to find that the mount is still reporting being out in dec which is possible for one of a couple of reasons, either the knobs were not tightened correctly or the mount has moved after being hit. Next weekend I will adjust if clear again, but this also means starting a whole new TPoint model.

When I drift align I will perform that on a star near the meridian and the celestial equator. I will then slew away then back and repeat. If all is well I will then test drift away from the equator to see if we have flex and if so if it is due to balance problems.

Viewing Report 12th July 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 20:32 – 22:56

After several reboots by GingerGeek who is looking after the observatory I am now logged in. I currently have the dome open and the 12″ centred on Deneb that can be clearly see whilst the Sun is still above the horizon and thus not dark yet.

The rebooting is due to hanging of the NUC. We have had various problems, the external ASI120MC with ASICAP/SharpCap and Firecap seem to cause an issue, we have a problem rebooting and the NUC just powering off and today trying to login through Windows and it was just hung. So lots of niggles.

Tonight I hope to test a single Ha guided exposure on the Elephant Trunk nebula in Cepheus to the North East as it rises and will look to image from 11pm for a few frames before closing the dome for the night. I have already noticed that Deneb is drifting in my FoV so something is still amiss with the polar alignment event though I thought I had it cracked. I will make a note to go back and check it. Currently Deneb is +42 Alt and 66 deg in Azimuth. I think the key will be looking at where I pick the star for polar alignment and making sure I have truly tightened.

So now it is nearly 10pm the sky is getting darker. The strangest thing happened, the dome closed. I only noticed as the image was blank. I checked and the Hitec Weather Station had tripped and closed the Dome. I toggled the Relay and then I could open the dome. Interestingly if you try to open the dome from TheSkyX it tries then stops and resets to closed. For the moment given the clear skies and forecast I have disconnected the Hitec Weather Station software but will reconnect later. Something else to debug.

It’s now 22:21 and dark enough to focus, I spent some time getting the auto focus routine working in SGPro. Interestingly I had to set the step size to 1000 given the 100k steps my FLI focuser is capable of. I also increased the data points to 10 and this gave me enough movement and data to get a good V curve.

I managed to get down to an HFR of on average 6 tonight at focus point 71290. It took me 3 runs to get the right figures. I then made the changes under the 12″ profile within Profile Manager and saved them for future use.

Next I moved on to PHD2 and guiding. Once I got an image I then found I only had hot pixels and no stars. I also had a funny cone of light and something large out of focus and the edge of the tube. I then remembered GingerGeek had fitted a new guard ring to the guider camera and inadvertently moved the position due to a loose screw elsewhere on the fitting. Thus I need to go and focus that the next night out as because I am not there tonight I cannot do this. This also means I am stuck for testing a guided exposure.

So instead I tried a few different exposures with the Ha filter unguided even though I knew I had the problem with polar alignment. I took exposures at 120 seconds and 180 seconds by which time I had trailing, given as I said I had polar aligned and could image for 10 minute exposures in a different part of the sky I need to redo the aspect. Note I did not perform a second autofocus on the Ha filter. I will at some point calibrate the offsets of the filters once I have the auto guider working.

120s Ha Elephant Trunk area still not dark

So at least a useful night to try and get a few things working, a few things to add to the ToDo list but all in all a good evening.

IMT3 Build Update – V

As the first phase of the build completes for the IMT3 observatory but before the commissioning stage begins, a few other additions need to be completed. We started with adding a UPS for the Intel NUC. The dome itself for the shutter at least runs on a battery backup in case of power failure, the dome automatically shuts. What we wanted to avoid was loosing power to the house and not being able to shut the PC down gracefully until power returned. The UPS also comes with software so that we can sense the power going and then ask the PC to shutdown if needed.

Temporary LED lighting has been fitted but needs properly fixing and connecting into the master switch and the soft switch for turning on and off remotely. The cables meanwhile to the first of many USB hubs starts to fill up.

An adapter station is fixed to the wall for the copious adapters one needs for astronomy

Shortly followed by another due the copious adapters needed for astronomy……….

Hat hooks are added due to a few unfortunate instance with a head and the mount which concluded in a hospital trip and some superglue.

Multiple weights can be seen supporting the large amount of the wieght at the business end of the mount

Whilst there is still much more to add including the imaging trains for the other OTAs and the focusers for each of them being added (Lakeside) I managed to go out one evening and get first light with the 12″ OTA on the Moon.

I started the first run of polar alignment with the PoleMaster for which I dedicated an entire blog entry to it here.

as it’s more complicated than one might think. This is the initial polar alignment through hard work and measuring twice always!

Polaris is the bright star and needs to be in the white circle. Not bad for a rough alignment. I then proceeded to adjust the alignment based on this first result until the green and red square/crosses aligned. It should be noted that the accuracy for the Polemaster is ok for short focal length OTAs but for long focal length you need to use a combination of approaches which include on the Paramount using TPoint followed by drift aligning using PHD2.

So after many days building out the IMT3 the 3 geeks with their hard hats relax and have another beer.

And the business end of the scope starts to look more useful and beautiful to the trained eye.

IMT3 Build Update – Part IV

So I left you with the weather station build out and will happily provide details of the software used and some of the challenges we had / have getting this working as out of the box most thing just don’t work, fortunately I have a Bob and a GingerGeek to assist 🙂

The outside takes shape with the patio being completed next to the french drain and a retaining wall being built, along with a small chimney of bricks to hold the master outside socket for the weather station.

Patio and retaining wall near French drain

The last few touches have been done to the Orangery and building of a second utility room which helped as it gave me somewhere to run the Cat6 cable from the dome 🙂

Although my cat Fluffy was curious about what it was.

The inside of the dome had the hole drilled and pipe and associated collet fitted for the dehumidifier

The dome controller fitted with the install from Pulsar sits above the electric supply as planned. The adjustment knobs for the dome rotation drive can also be seen. They did need adjusting and finally settled down after the dome slipped in various places. The only remaining issue that I may never fix is the gaps in-between the sections of the dome, when they go over the role they cause the dome to drop, judder and make a noise, really they should be tightly fitted, filled and taped.

During the night I rotated the dome to the various positions around the sky to map, North, East, South and West and included the offset to Polaris as can be seen below.

With most of the ancillary work now done attention turned to installing the mount and the OTAs. First the Paramount ME II had to be fitted with three people in assistance to lifting. Once in place the placement and threading of cables through the mount had to take place, it always amazes me how many cables are needed to do astronomy!

The top end of the mount shows the Versa-Plate missing so that the cable can be pulled through. Several power cables and a master USB cable were fitted.

Finally the first of the 3 OTAs are fitted, this is the Officinal Stellare 305mm RiDK that the other 2 OTAs would piggy-back on.

Luckily we opted for a 2.7m dome else we would not have fitted this setup in here.

Next came the fitting of the Takahashi FS102 refractor and the Sky-Watcher Esprit 120ED refractor. First the clamshell for the Tak is fitted, also the first dry fitting of the QHY1600MM camera and 7 position filter wheel, the adapters to connect it would cane later.

Then the Tak is fitted. As can be seen from this image taken later, we had to make a new counterweight system to offset the slightly lighter Tak with the heavier Esprit 120. This novel system designed by Bob used standard astronomy weights and bars from skywatcher mounts.

Next the Skywatcher 120 is fitted carefully to the other side.

Next some more ancillary work is needed before the final setup is shown…….

IMT3 Build Update – Part III

So in my last post I left you with the pier being fitted, this is just the start of the journey to be able to place the mount and telescope OTA’s Optical Tube Assembly on top. All of that would require power! And to fix all the power to the pier I needed a piece of wood which I had handy in the garage.

Once fitted this became one of two panels within the dome. We really wanted to keep the power and data and associated cables to two places. This would have a the MEII power supply at the top, a power strip to the right, the master power coming in from below and to a 2-way switch, there would be additions to this later.

The other board would sit by the incoming power and data supplies near the edge and Eastern side of the dome. A master switch for the lights, another power strip, a waterproof box for the MacMini, later to be changed to an Intel NuC due to software issues that we later realised we could fix 🙁 A 10 port USB hub (one of many), master Ethernet port for the incoming network connection from the house and providing 330MB into the dome and finally the master double socket for the electric.

Meanwhile the view from the Orangery was great, with the dome taking shape, although the plan is to have fencing and planting to soften the view for others.

The floor of the dome was painted with garage floor paint to seal in the concrete. It would transpire that the rubber matting I would later fit would need a DPC membrane under it to stop the build up of condensation caused by the cold concrete against the warmer rubber.

Meanwhile, we continued outside with building the supporting infrastructure, including a master soak-away and putting in the weather station pole and associated instruments. GingerGeek spent time helping dig the soak-away, we dug down either side of the concrete to the North and West which would be backfired with 20mm shingle.

A hole was then dug for the drainage for the dehumidifier, a must for any observatory. The plant pot has holes drilled in and was then filled with shingle to stop any soil from backfilling over time.

Round to the West of the dome we started to dig out the section for the soak-away.

I had purchased a sturdy large plastic container (I could stand on it without it flexing) and then drilled a fair amount of holes in it. It was then buried in the ground, connected to a standard large drainage pipe typically found taking waster from the house and connected that into it, completing the connection with several guns of mastic.

This was then connected to the plastic french drain we had previously dug out for and fitted.

Once this was done we laid the 20mm gravel to the entire North and West of the dome to cover, the plant pots as a reminder of where the soak-away was.

The pipe for the dehumidifier was covered with a standard plumbing pipe insulating cover to protect it from frost

The weather station fitting was a pole Bob had purchased and found brackets to fit to the fence to the West. The top instrument is a cloud monitor and rain detector from HiTech Astro and works well. We have it connected to the dome through a relay Bob put together so once cloud is detected or rain the dome closes and will not open unless you override in the software. The instrument to the right is the Sky Quality Meter provided by GingerGeek and is fantastic and telling you how dark it is and when my neighbours put their lights on or God forbid don’t turn them off all night …….. A further instrument was added later for an All Sky Camera which is a ZWO ASI120MC that Bob placed inside a dome and then connected through

IMT3 Build Update – Part II

So the dome was built in a day, which was clearly quicker than Rome 🙂 The video of the construction can be seen below. The new Orangery is to the right and the building mess within my garden is apparent.

IMT3 Timelapse Construction

With all the planning, I was always slightly nervous the cable pipes we had now concreted in place would not be in the correct positions. I required a set outside the dome, a set just inside where the electrics and computers would sit and a set near the pier. Fortunately I was pleased I measured twice 🙂

As you can see above the pier was fitted centrally which is what I wanted rather than offset as some suggest. The pier was a standard pulsar pier and took some time after fitting by Pulsar themselves to settle. As can be seen below, they fitted rods and bolts to secure and used a resin in the holes drilled.

This was different than my last observatory where I used long 12″ bolts. After tightening with a spanner the pier seemed secure but upon placing weight on it it started to move. I then tightened to the point where it was still vibrating a lot. I left a week to settle then came back with a torque wrench to tighten again. This drew the bolts out by about an inch which told me the resin had not gone off. Another week went by and I tightened a little more, this time the wrench kicked in with clicking and the bolts held, the pier stopped vibrating and all is finally well including the top plate fitted but Pulsar with a standard Meade pre drilled pattern.

Standard Meade pre drilled top (notch to the left is North)

I asked for the pier to be central and gave the Pulsar team the direction for North using a compass on my phone and checking with a traditional compass. Hopefully this would get me near the North Celestial pole once we fitted the Paramount MEII mounting plate we had. It turned out a few new holes needed to be drilled in our slightly used plate which to be fair was used for previous telescope mounts including a Meade 16″, Skywatcher EQ6, Paramount ME and now the MEII.

You can see Bob’s name proudly punched into the aluminium as well as the original manufacturing date of 2008.

IMT3 Build Update – Part I

Ok so it’s been a while, well more than a while, as Douglas Adams once said, ‘you thought it was a long way down the road to the chemist’ well I can tell you it’s a long road to building a commissioning an off the shelf observatory too! So even though the observatory is nearly complete I though I would share the build experience here on this very blog.

So it’s not been helped by the weather, it’s not been helped by the other building work on the house and it’s definitely not been helped by working so much either. The Ripton Windows team, incidently who are building a lovely Orangery for me as well as some other works, were also good enough to take on building the base and laying the electrics and network access.

The base for the pier was a single discrete 1m cube of concrete and surrounding that a slab of concrete of 3m square and 150mm deep. This was so the pier is isolated from any vibrations from the dome rotating or people walking about inside the dome.

The team from Ripton took a few days to dig the hole, pour the concrete in a couple of stages and then we had many weeks for it to set due to a delay in the Pulsar 2.7m dome arriving for install. I also laid a shingle surround to act as a french drain and included a homemade soaraway, more pictures later.

Work started with digging out from the outside in using a JCB, the team did a quick and good job, considering all the clay.

After some rain holding off the final dig, the team managed to dig out the rest of the base including the much deeper but separate 1m cube.

Scalpings were then laid and shuttering to act as a former for the central cube was fitted, this included DPC to help keep the cube from being effected by the surrounding area. PVC piping was also added before the mix was poured for the data and electric cable runs.

Before long the concrete was poured for both the inner and outer segments, now you can see the level below ground to which we dug to make sure we were inside the planning rules for the area.

Creating my very own stone henge, allowed me to see where the dome would finally come to.

I then went one stage further and placed a plastic pipe vertically to see the height of the final dome once fitted.

Finally my favourite electrician Steve fitted the main power to the outside and included CAT6 cable back to the main fibre hub for me.

This was run under the ground through plastic pipe, even though the cable was armoured, in case we wanted to run additional cables later.

Viewing Report 29th/30th June 2019 – IMT3 Observatory & Travel Scope

Viewing time period – 22:01 – 03:18

Tonight Bob will be learning how to control the observatory and using the Tak FS102 to trying imaging. Meanwhile I will be setting up my new Paramount MyT on its Berlebach tripod and with a new Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 mounted on top. The business end has my new QHY168C, yes I purchased a 2nd one, they are that good.

Whilst Bob played, I setup the travel kit on the new patio. I realised I could connect the camera through the USB on the MyT to one cable that won’t get snagged. I will however need to connect a power for the camera as that is currently trailing. There is a power connector on the back of the mount but I believe it is only rated to 1amp. There is however another power out which is rated at 7.5 amps so I will buy a Tycoon KPPX-4P 4 pin couple of connectors and makeup a cable so I can plug into that directly.

So I connected to TheSkyX with the mount and slewed to Arcturus. I could not connect the QHY camera to TheSkyX as I seem to be missing a driver. I will take a further look tomorrow to see if there is one. Instead I used the EzCap software they provide and connected the camera to that.

I focused manually as I have not motor focus to keep things simple, and soon had stars in view. I then did a manual spiral search until I found Arcturus and then synced on it. I could then slew around the sky with ease.

For polar alignment I have ordered (my friend GingerGeek has ordered) a PoleMaster mounting plate that I can use, this will make it easy to align. Tonight I just plonked the mount down without any polar alignment, thus anything more than 10 seconds produced trailing.

I tested cooling the camera, slewing and parking, although I need to see the park position 180 degrees from the current position to allow the scope rings to be in the right place for removing the OTA.

The scope and the mount and the camera make a great travel setup, each component is not too heavy to move by itself, the connection and setup is fairly straightforwards and I really do look forward to testing this out in October in Tenerife. I do need to test running from a car battery to see how long things last. I have my car battery I use for astronomy on charge and will test next time.

The connection of the camera to the flattener is a push fit and is missing the luminance filter. I will order the right adapters from Modern Astronomy so that I can fit later.

So I still have a few things to make, buy, test and do before October but good progress tonight on the travel setup front.

Meanwhile Bob has been making good progress with the Tak FS 102 in the IMT3. Imaging Arcturus and testing lengths of exposure on different objects such as M13. Some pieces of the sky Bob was imaging at 5 minutes unguided and others such as M13 only 3 minutes. I need to look at why this is given I now think the polar alignment from last night is excellent.

I reset the FoV indicator for the Tak FS102 in relation to the main 12″ scope. I need to find a way of slewing to given object for the offset scopes. I also need to be shown how you use SGPro to slew too, rather than using TheSkyX, so a slew, plate solve and then final adjustment.

Viewing Report 28th/29th June 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 22:34 – 03:52

Well it was time again to perform another TPoint run and adjust the polar alignment. Tonight was all about refining the previous alignment using the Point software which then measures the error once you have 20 points and reports back how many ‘tic’ marks on the mount you have to adjust.

The first run produced an error of +17.8 arc minutes for the azimuth so I had to a adjust the mount counterclockwise 22.8 tics. The error in dec was 8.3 arc minutes so I had a smaller adjustment of 8.6 tics on the altitude.

I then ran a second Tpoint model, again just over 20 points and this time the error was reduced to 12 arcmins for the azimuth but 12 for the altitude so dec. Instead of adjusting by tics now was the time to start drift aligning using PHD2.

I brought up the program, found a start near the Meridian and near the celestial equator and quickly found a guide star since my FoV indicators within TheSkyX now line up. The error in the drift align matched very well the error within the Point model so I adjusted by the number of Tics suggested in TheSkyX. Once done I performed a third Point model of 20 stars.

By this time it was already 1:34am and I had been refining this for 3 hours, the new model told me that I was only 4.2 arcseconds out in azimuth and -2.9 arc mins out in dec. Once again I went back to PHD2 and from then on just drift aligned to refine the error.

This took until 3am when the error was a mere 0.8 arc seconds for the altitude so Dec and 0.1 arc seconds for the azimuth so RA. This was then good enough to take a quick 10min unguided image through the 12″ which is 2.5m focal length. Very impressive.

10 min unguided exposure – note the doughnuts due to it getting light

I then quickly finished off by performing another 20 point TPoint run so I had a model to use tomorrow night so that both Bob and GingerGeek can further commission the two refractors. I will perform a further longer Point run for turning on ProTrack in a few months.

For now it is light, the birds are singing and I ought to go to bed 🙂

Viewing Report 22nd/23rd June 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 22:00 – 02:31

Tonight Bob and GingerGeek came over to progress with commissioning the observatory. The task for tonight was to get the Esprit 120 focused and given first light. As the evening progressed there was slight frustration of how long it was taking to sync on a star, in terms of finding it and then being able to sync so we could go back to it. This is because I had been the night before messing with the polar alignment and we have yet to perform a Point run.

It also took some time to get focused on the Esprit due to us setting the maximum extent to the focuser tube incorrectly, falling short of the distance needed at the back focus to get good focus. We then had to go into the observatory and modify the maximum out figure for the Lakeside focuser.

Once this was done focus was achieved and GingerGeek used autofocus within SGPro to get good focus.

A single image was taken to prove it.

Next we need to refine the polar alignment with a TPoint run and then perform a longer Point run to finish the commissioning of the Paramount MEII.

Slaving the Dome (Part 1)

It has been interesting to see if we can automate the Pulsar Dome through ASCOM to slave it to the movement of the Paramount MEII and the 3 OTAs that reside on top.

We originally tried using SGPro and a complicated spreadsheet from Pulsar to record and then model the spherical trigonometry that is needed to make this work. After a number of days we gave up as it simply was not aligning the slit of the dome with the main OTA let alone the other 2 that are piggybacked.

So we are now trying to resolve using TheSkyX Dome Add-On, an expensive piece of software from Bisque that if it works, despite the cost is worth every penny.

Well after putting in some simple figures as stated in TheySkyX user manual over a few pages, we have managed to slave the dome slit to the main scope with ease. It was really very simple and after the mucking about with SGPro and the model information from Pulsar spreadsheet, it just works. I then took a look at the 2 other OTAs and have changed various figures that I will share once all work flawlessly. These figures are to do with offsets for the OTAs from the optical centre of the main OTA. I have asked Bisque to confirm I am changing the right figures and asked how I save them to a profile or alike so that I do not have to re-enter them every time we want to swap scopes to image from. I have also asked for clarity around moving the dome at sidereal using the distance of the OTA to the dome slit figure.

Dome Add-On setting page for configuring the scope offset

At the moment whilst I await their return on the questions, the mount is able to slew around the sky and the main OTA is always within the centre of the dome. The 2 other OTAs if I change the figures in the fields for the offsets also are in the main through the slit, just near the meridian there is a slight overlap but I have guessed some fo the figures so they may be wrong.

More to update later once I have the clarity from Software Bisque I hope.

Almost Completed

So another day spent with Dave and Bob just finishing off the finishing touches to the scope/mount installation whilst Dave messed about pretending to be a brickie and spent lots of time not actually doing any brick work so we think he may now be qualified.

We spent some time tidying up cabling and testing a low light camera for use in the dome at night so we can see what the mount and dome are actually doing.

Now the Chroma Ha and OIII 3nm filters are now installed into the SX filter wheel the only things that remains is to wait for the delivery of a cable (FTDI) to connect to the Optec Flip Flat panel.

Obviously the next bit is working out if the reducer to CCD spacing for the 3rd scope is correct and work out the focuser backlash so we can correctly use SGPro focus offsets for the filters.