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
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.
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.
