20:00 – 21:30
IC5067 Pelican in OIII and SII, rotated to new angle to allow guide star on West side of the mount. 10 x each channel at 600s and Gain 139 Offset 21, left running and dome shut later in the morning.
Rotation angle 218 from SGPro plate solve, 171.750 from TSX
Flats done the following day 3rd Nov.
Flats darks and darks still to be done
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.
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.
