Rusted

Aha! The Zanzibar Fallacy.

Thanks Andrew. Is two years from new long enough to gain two minutes? I am off to reduce LST by two minutes to see if that finally brings AWR to heel on Gotos. Earlier rain has given way to sunny periods. So I'm off to play.

Hi Andrew, AWR maintains an internal quartz clock crystal. You can't override it. All you can do is set your precise location and it will/should calculate LST from the RTC. That said I had to change the summer time settings when AWR disagreed with several online LST calculators. But that was a straight one hour difference. Not just two minutes. I'm on the CET band in Europe. One hour forwards of Gravely Blighted's clock time.

The same held true with Meade PST etalons. Do Daystar assemble their instruments in Mexico using cheap labour? Optics seems to be going the way of hifi. If you can't tell the difference it must be your own ears/eyes. I prefer <cough> blind testing but doubt that would go down well with solar enthusiasts.

Thanks Tony. I monitor the ASCOM support group and they regularly warn against re-installing. I did ASCOM Diagnostics and Conformance scans yesterday to no avail. No problems found and I have all the latest versions. AWR repeated the advice to ensure I have the correct site location. I confirmed my location with three different aerial photography services to the centre of my pier. Decided averaging and rounding to a tenth of a second just wasn't good enough. So I used Google Earth which shows my pier inside my observatory to a hundredth of a second. Thanks Julian, but I have never knowingly done any plate solving. I'm more of a click and Goto sort of chap. Just finding the Moon and Sun are presently much too difficult for ASCOM/AWR/CduC. Perhaps they are simply not team players?

Hi, I am still trying to pin down why my AWR/ASCOM Goto slews are ALWAYS inaccurate when using C-Du-C. [Skychart] My observatory site coordinates are set to within one second in both Latitude and Longitude on the AWR IH2 paddle. My site location in C-Du_C is also precisely set to the second. I have set C-Du-C time to System time with 10 seconds refresh. Now comes the hard part: If I hover the cursor over the Meridian on the C-Du-C chart I think I should get LST. [Local Sidereal Time] Instead I get a difference of -2 minutes compared to AWR's LST. An online LST calculator also shows a discrepancy of exactly -2 minutes compared to AWR. Local Sidereal Time Clock But it also agrees exactly with C-Du-C. In fact have to change the longitude setting in the LST calculator [link above] by 0.62° to match the LST indicated on the AWR paddle. So, which of these three LSTs is right? A: The two which agree? B: Or the one which doesn't? 😄 None of them and I'm doing it all wrong? Thanks

Absolutely amazing images, as always.

Do you mean like this? That is my two storey observatory looking west. House is on the southern border to the left.

My thoughts exactly! Usually on a daily basis. I find the solar surface in H-a, in real life, is like watching pink frog spawn. Stills would have to be very lucky to capture what is seen fleetingly with the eye during any video capture. I'm talking about a greatly enlarged view on a decent high res. monitor here. Visual is very different. Here's a live video I took to show exactly how I see the computer screen. I was suffering from a nuisance veiling effect at the time. If you look behind the veil then that is my live H-a. 6" f/8 PST modified refractor using a ZWO120MC camera. Real aperture something like 120mm f10. I am deliberately moving the telescope around with the drives to emphasise the foreground veiling.

The remote control aspect has been discussed and is highly desirable to avoid footfall vibration under these special circumstances. A Pulsar is light, as observatories go, but would need a very sturdy [plywood?] floor bolted down to the garage roof to resist gales. I'd probably avoid a dome altogether and have a roll-off shelter for the telescope and mount only. Guyed to avoid wind problems. Then you can raise a windbreak around the perimeter of the garage roof to hide it all. If you don't have to literally get under a short refractor to look up through the eyepiece then the whole kit can all be very low indeed. Just enough clearance for a camera to swing above the garage roof with the OTA at the vertical. Park the thing with minimum height in mind for designing the weatherproof box. Or, carry the whole kit in and out of the door onto prepared marks on the garage roof for minimum impact. Store the kit safely indoors. It's not as sexy as a "real" observatory but you don't need one for imaging. Observatories are horribly cold and draughty. Nasty! 🥶

I have a fourteen feet high, isolated pier to a raised observatory dome. Naturally I did not want any obstruction on the ground floor. So I built a simple, four sided pyramid out of 4x4s. [100x100.] The top half is clad in plywood for stiffness but open below. The legs are splayed out at ground level to avoid obstruction. Though the angles are very unlikely to suit a single garage. Not if you want to park a normal car in there. A double garage could have a chimney block pier in the middle. Walking on a wooden floor will disturb a telescope very badly. When I accidentally shorted out the isolation of my pier from the floor it was hopeless. Every movement was amplified. Even using a keyboard or mouse. Then there is the matter of safe access to your observatory. Nor do you want a block or brick wall below the telescope soaking up the sun's heat all day. Only to let it escape again right in the path of your optics.

Thanks Dave!

Dogh! Two sets of processed images of the same SW prom. I deliberately and rather crudely processed them all in Registax with the same OTT wavelets scheme. Next time I shall centre the SharpCap cross-hairs on the limb.

It's not OT if it expands our knowledge via the hive mind.

I have spent Sunday morning capturing H-alpha videos of the large prom on the SW limb. In between I have selected one video with good detail and stepped Registax "Best Frames" upwards from 5% in 5% steps, right up to 100%. Alignment and Stacking were used with each step up in Best frames but NO wavelets. These still images were each saved and labelled to ensure accuracy. A short video of these stills, in the correct sequence from 5% to 100%, was made with 1 second duration per still. If you can see a difference between any of these then you ought to apply to Marvel for a lead part in their next film.

So did I. But I was told off by somebody here.

ZWO120MC, 24RGB, USB3 to SSD, i7 laptop with 16GB, 120fps. 120/10. I usually whack a 2x Barlow in when the seeing is rubbish. 2% of 3000 frames of 480x960 and cropped. I used to do 30% but was told off.

Here be dragons!

Thanks Dave. There was tremendous agitation of the image on the monitor. I'm amazed anything came out of it. It's been a lovely day here with full sun, 64F and not much wind. Shame about the poor seeing conditions.

Thanks Charl. I'm still struggling to make the most of my video captures.

Dogh! I'm a martyr to high frequency, thermal agitation.

My PST IBF was just the same. No detail visible through the scope. Bought a new one from the US: Maier. optical filters, neutral density filters, bandpass filters Views transformed!

Thanks Dave. I didn't even notice the bands until I'd posted the images. The forum images certainly look different to my own results at home. Yet are seen on exactly the same monitor. It's not all bad news though. They often look better in some ways on the forum. Brighter and sharper than at home. I'll take the new IR filter off and return to the ZWO standard [naked] filter. It makes no [real] sense to filter for IR in H-a.

Rusted! Regards, Rusted

Thanks Pete. I am getting back to the finer detail I seem to have lost of late. Cleaning the optics may be the answer to my problems. I just need a bigger washing up bowl to dunk the whole OTA.