So whilst Dave was in his garden using the binoculars and failing down holes in the process I was setting up to relearn how to take images ….. it’s been that long and the weather hasn’t helped.
So all was going well except that the Moon was bright and right near the winter nebulas. Even how bright the moon was I decided to use the time and practice using the Monkey Head Nebula as my target.
The tripod was levelled and the iOptron CEM60 polar aligned, the scope was balanced, the Atik460 CCD was cooled (-25℃), OpenPHD calibrated, the plate solver completed and the successfully sync’d and . The first step was to autofocus on a decent bright set of stars before the imaging run.
That was when the night was over ! SGPro set about running it’s autofocus but strange things were happening. SGPro was reporting that the LakeSide Astro focuser position was changing but the star HFR profile was not changing and the V curve remained flat. Since the focuser position was “changing” I did not think to go out into the garden with a red torch for an hour.
Upon inspection it was fairly obvious why it wasn’t working and inside the issue was proved to be a disconnected wire on the motor port.
I thought it would be prudent to double check which of the two spare connectors the wire came from and indeed it is the top one.
Removing the heat shrink outer and you can see that there is barely any wire left since the majority of it was left in the solder when it broke off. This will require a wire extension and the old solder with the remains of the wire removed first before new solder being reapplied.
So since I’m really bad at soldering and I was worried about having to replace the whole unit (£90) I asked a friend who is fairly handy at this to perform the fix for me.
