Well after a great day out visiting amongst other telescopes the MONS where we have observed before, I setup and waiting for the last night to become dark. The night was truly stunning at 0.7’ seeing, warm and calm. Low humidity was effecting us, else all the other elements were playing ball. I setup and captured the Moon
Moon
before heading over to Comet Olbers first.
Comet Olbers
After this I set a run on the Dragons again so to add to my data from the other night.
NGC 6188 Dragons
Once this was set and the rest of the plan was in place I headed off to bed at 1am and left the setup capturing some additional data on both M30
M30 Globular Cluster
and M11.
M11 Globular Cluster
I then went on to image M54 which is really small at 1.6 arc minutes.
M54 Globular Cluster
Lastly I grabbed some data on M14 which is a slightly larger globular cluster at 2.6 arc minutes.
M14 Globular Cluster
In the morning I reviewed the data and unfortunately due to the altitude of some of the objects I did have to reject quite a few frames, however I did capture enough to create a decent image.
I will start by completing the TPoint run tonight before moving on to calibrate the guider and make sure I can get and image. So by 10:30pm it was just on the border of being dark enough to take and plate solve the first image and continue the TPoint session.
So by 11:30pm I had finished the 212 TPoint model.
212 TPoints
The next thing was to do a Supermodel on the data. This reduced the error pointing from 500 & 23.7 arcsecs to 100 & 19.
Model
Now connected camera to SGP and running autofocus on a mag 6 star, new focus position for Luminance is 18,312 at 00:13
New focus position
I then setup OpenPHD2 to guide and here I hit a problem. The guider did not move the mount. I have not got a guider cable attached as I do not want to do Pulse Guiding. Instead I always do Direct Guiding. So I looked at the settings in PHD2 and the mount was not set. So I went and searched my blog and I need to select the ASCOM Telescope Driver for TheySky. However it is not in the dropdown list.
ASCOM Telescope Driver for TheSky
Finally after a lot of head scratching I remember GingerGeek removed ASCOM and upgraded when I moved house. He had inadvertently removed the said driver and forgot to reinstall. I went to the ASCOM webpage, found the driver which took me to the Bisque website and downloaded. I then installed, restarted TheSkyX using PHD2 after I had restarted PHD2, I selected the said driver in the Mount dropdown and connected. This then moves the mount when I calibrate and subsequently guide. Fortunately I found all these answers on my blog posts from last year when I had setup the guiding originally.
Finally guiding
Now all of this is working it is rapidly approaching the time when the sky brightens, so it is already after 1am. I slewed to M14 using TSX, performed a Closed Loop Slew with the camera connected to TSX initially. Once I confirmed the object was in the centre of the FoV, I then disconnected the camera from TSX and reconnected to SGP.
M14
Guiding started, all started to work well. A couple of snags, focus position was wrong in the filter setup so I need to change. Tries to autofocus on start of sequence so I need to change that. I then decided to grab 1, 2 and 5 min subs of LRGB to determine the best exposure. However half way through and some localised cloud rolled in and stopped the session.
Clouds
The good thing its the closed loop slew is working well in TSX.
So with the local cloud still causing issues to the South, I slewed North East to another Messier target on my list, M29. Once again I setup 1,2 and 5 min exposures across LRGB to see which would be best. All the imaging tonight for Globular Clusters and Open Clusters was done at Gain 10 Offset 10.
M29 test 2mins Red
I manage to get frames and then I was afflicted by the same cloud. So instead I packed up and called it a night.
