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Cheer me up share your Astro fails I'll start


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Last night I made a stupid mistake that ruined my night with clear skies[emoji35] I'll start with mine but would love to hear yours so I know it's not just me. So after being up since 4:30 for work I decided to still go out around 18:30 but not stay out too long as tiredness and Astro equipment problems don't mix. I just wanted to do a small test run using the new obsy computer I have just put in, unbelievably everything worked first time and I was testing my star Alignment points with the camera attached as I had done the original points last week with an eyepiece which obviously has a different fov. So this is where it all falls apart, after getting the mount guiding great I thought I would pop in and make a cup of tea and then come out to shut down if there wasn't any problems. Tea made I wandered out to check all was well and it was, finally I thought I would just mark the focuser tube on my main scope with a pen for future reference,dropping the pen I bent down to pick it up and came right up under the counterweight head first into the bar[emoji30]. Now for the really great bit, now kneeling down holding my head I reach up to help myself up using the cabinet that houses the PC forgetting that I have put my hot tea on the top pulling the laminated card its standing on and pouring hot tea over my arm and leg. Now wandering around the garden verbally expressing my anger I decide that I have calmed down enough to pack up. So just to add insult to injury I notice I have budged the mount ruining the alignment date points I have saved and have to redo this next session before I can get imaging. So basically everything was fine till I got involved [emoji23]

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I had a bit of a fail last night also though I think if I use the glass half full concept I'm a winner.

After finishing off some ha for a mosaic I'm doing, I accidently closed the capture software so I started it up again, slewed to new target and started doing 15 min subs. after three I got clouded off. Not happy I shut everything down and as I was closing the capture software I realised I hadn't reset the cooling. 

The bad part is I imaged at about 8.5 deg c.....the good thing is I only did three subs.

As I said, glass half full :D

Edit: actually, compared to you I had a great night  :evil:

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I was recently tearing my hair out over why my scope wouldn't align with SSA autoalign, scratching my head looking at the scope for 15 minutes as it slews around the sky not collecting any data. Upon deciding to disconnect and reinsert the cable I realised the lens cap was still on. Not quite as bad as your night but it made me feel like a right thunder-plumb. -.- 

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Last night I made a stupid mistake that ruined my night with clear skies[emoji35] I'll start with mine but would love to hear yours so I know it's not just me. So after being up since 4:30 for work I decided to still go out around 18:30 but not stay out too long as tiredness and Astro equipment problems don't mix. I just wanted to do a small test run using the new obsy computer I have just put in, unbelievably everything worked first time and I was testing my star Alignment points with the camera attached as I had done the original points last week with an eyepiece which obviously has a different fov. So this is where it all falls apart, after getting the mount guiding great I thought I would pop in and make a cup of tea and then come out to shut down if there wasn't any problems. Tea made I wandered out to check all was well and it was, finally I thought I would just mark the focuser tube on my main scope with a pen for future reference,dropping the pen I bent down to pick it up and came right up under the counterweight head first into the bar[emoji30]. Now for the really great bit, now kneeling down holding my head I reach up to help myself up using the cabinet that houses the PC forgetting that I have put my hot tea on the top pulling the laminated card its standing on and pouring hot tea over my arm and leg. Now wandering around the garden verbally expressing my anger I decide that I have calmed down enough to pack up. So just to add insult to injury I notice I have budged the mount ruining the alignment date points I have saved and have to redo this next session before I can get imaging. So basically everything was fine till I got involved [emoji23]

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Well at least it was only yourself you damaged and not your precious equipment!  :wink:

My worst moment was setting up one night - I put the CG5 mount onto the tripod, turned round to get the scope and heard the mount crash onto the concrete floor - I had forgotten to bolt the mount to the tripod.  :eek:  :eek:   Amazingly the mount was virtually unscathed but there was a big chunk out of the concrete. The CG5s may not be precision made, but they are robust!

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Poor bubbles!

To quote Ash, the evil cyborg in alien 1:

"I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies."

This is at least a good motto for my imaging ;)

My best fail from last night - micro-managing my scope positioning until i realized (after half an hour) that my mount was tracking in sidereal rate instead of lunar rate.....

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Oh I've had lots of fail moments:

Leaving the Bahtinov focus mask on at the start of an imaging run (luckily I noticed before I had done to many subs!)

Forgetting to start the cooler on my Camera

Binning the camera to make centering the target easier, then forgetting to take the binning off.

Wondering why my camera wasn't finding any stars, then realising I hadn't removed the cover on the end of the scope.

I think my favorite one was after a polar alignment. I put the mount head back the wrong way so my laptop thought that up was down and down was up. Took me ages to work out why my scope was slewing down towards the ground...

I've since created a small checklist that I run through each session just to make sure everything is as it should be :grin:

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Last week I set up everything to capture the Small Magellanic Cloud. Polar alignment - focus - guiding. When I was happy with everything I started taken images and checked PhD every now and again that it was behaving. After three hours decided I had enough, had a quick look on the DSLR and realized that I had left the Bhatinov mask on the scope...  :embarassed: 

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The bahtinov mask trick is one I have performed on a few occasions, but I think one not mentioned so far is getting perfect guiding on a previously calibrated PHD run to realise far too late that it was a hot pixel. The more physically damaging one was slewing to a low point on the Southern meridian for some drift align practice when the USB cable on the filter wheel caught against a tripod leg and ripped the usb port off the circuit board in less than 3 seconds.

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One I did a week or so ago, new camera and setting up the autofocus - the V-curve was persistently coming out almost flat. I spent over an hour fiddling with step sizes and so on and eventually decided the focuser must be slipping somehow. Went outside to find the lead from controller to motor was not plugged in. I would have thought the controller might have thrown an error but no, it was happily sending commands to a non-existent motor :-)

ChrisH

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Locking my keys in the boot of my car......along with all my scope kit whilst camping. Of course that night was one of the darkest and clearest I can remember and all I could do was look up, and cry into my beer [emoji22][emoji22][emoji6]

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I had just gotten to grips with using EQMOD to control my HEQ-5 with a laptop.

I had gotten into a good, quick workflow groove to get out and under the stars double-quick so as to maximise imaging time, and was using APT to plate-solve for alignment points. Very smooth, very efficient, gets me on target within 30mins.

One night, the scope simply refuses to point properly, it wasn't off by a few degrees it was off by nearly 45 degrees every time. Even manually slewing and syncing didn't seem to help, the pointing error was reduced but remained very far from the target object. I sat out in the garden, frantically re-levelling and polar aligning, clearing my alignment points, starting again in different sky quadrants, running as Administrator, turning off autoguiding, changing USB cables and switching to powerpack instead of mains. Nothing worked. An entire imaging session was lost, with the clouds ever thickening and me getting ever more baffled and confused.

Eventually I work out, with the sky now sludgy orange muck above me, that the CMOS battery in the laptop was dying and had reset the date and time.  :mad:

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Walked into the counterweight of my old 14" Newtonian, with the end of the dec shaft hitting somewhere ... ahem "delicate". Bit of a double whammy... argh, then, crunch ove the top of the wieghts. 

I painted the end of the shaft white after that.

Kev

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Sympathies, I have had the "nut-cracker suite experience" with the counterweights.  

Well at least you didn't spill the tea over your laptop.

Carole 

The literal "nut-cracker" would seem to take quite some doing, involving a step-ladder and a partly clad male observer - unless of course "nut" means "head" in this case... That, I can well understand: I've banged my head on the weights often and even have a bruise today.

P

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I once lugged my FS128 and a G11 mount out to the car, including eyepiece case and power pack. Then drove for an hour to a dark site to meet up with a few mates, only to find after setting the mount up I'd forgot the counterweight. I was just a bit grumpy that night. Ive had similar adventures over the years when I've left the powerpack behind making the G11 useless, and the same with eyepieces. You'd think I'd learn!

Last week one of my observing buddies, who incidentally is quite a bit shorter than I am, walked into my observatory and straight into the counterweight arm of my pier mounted GP. The arm made a nasty gash just above his left eye which bled for the best part of an hour. He used a number of expletives when I said "That was lucky!" He also grumbled a bit when I wouldn't let him look through my XW's until he'd stopped bleeding

That same friend was in his own observatory a while back when he decided to try and balance his 6" F15 refractor a bit better. He loosened the locking collar on his home made German equatorial in an attempt to re position its large cast iron counterweight. The weight was too heavy for him and promptly slid straight off the counterweight shaft and onto his foot. The 6" F15, also in a heavy metal tube, then swung round at considerable speed and belted him across the side of his head, knocking him flat out on the floor.

Several years ago id taken a 6" F8 Chinese achromat to a dark site a few miles from home. The refractor was on quite a short tripod, so I had to grovel around on the floor when the scope was looking towards the zenith. It was a great night but what made it most memorable was that after I'd packed the ice clad refractor back into the car, I shone my torch on the ground just to check I hadn't dropped anything of importance such as an eyepiece, only to find I'd been grovelling around on a bed of used condoms.

Lesson? Check the ground BEFORE you set up.

Mike

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Nice topic. I've yet to buy my first scope, but I'm window shopping. This topic is steering me away from anything with a complex mount, electrics, or imaging :-)

My best so far was smugly using my rear bicycle light as a cheap alternative to finding a proper red light torch on one of my first nights out. When it inevitably went into emergency strobe mode and nearly permanently blinded me, I realised my error...

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I think my biggest "fail" recently has been just not getting out enough.

I'm spending two evenings a week swimming whilst the children do their training (up to about 4km a week now) which generally leaves me too tired to want to do anything other than with bins.  Then there's another evening when I take them to swim training but I can't swim.  And probably half of the weekends between now and the end of the year we have swimming competitions to attend.  I often end up working one evening a week, too.  Trying to catch up on all the other things that need doing in the time that's left has sapped my appetite for late nights out under the stars recently.

Getting the obsy sorted will help a lot, but I've been informed there are other things I must now complete before I'm allowed to start on that :)

James

[Edit: oh, I forgot about the weekend hockey matches, too...]

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Faffing around checking cables, reinstalling camera drivers, rebooting the computer and then discovering the lens cap was on (a routine mistake).  Then going and making exactly the same mistake with the guide scope.  This is what happens when you go out to put away kit because of cloud and discover that it's suddenly cleared but you've not put your normal sub zero clothing on and get hypothermic.  I struggled to get back to the house that night I got so cold

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The literal "nut-cracker" would seem to take quite some doing, involving a step-ladder and a partly clad male observer - unless of course "nut" means "head" in this case..

Lol, just found this reply.  Yes as I am female, it is indeed the head I am referring to.  

Carole 

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