Shimonu

I was out tonight trying to figure out what was wrong with my guiding. I would always have the Total RMS climb to around 2" and it could be stable for some time and fluctuate, sometimes as bad as going to 4". Most of the error would be in RA from what I could see so I was worried my mount had to much play in the RA axis and tried to tighten it and make sure I couldn't feel anything. This didn't seem to have any effect. After being out for an hour trying to run PHD2 guiding assistant among other things and failing I just started to look at what options i had in Ekos and eventually I just tried setting the binning to 2x2 thinking maybe some different stars would be chosen. Bam, suddenly my guiding is great! It'll be around 0.75" at the best and 1.5" at the absolute worst. I'm ecstatic, I feel like such a weight has been lifted and everything is falling into place! But what about this makes a difference to guiding? What is changing by going to bin 2x2 to have the guiding improve so noticeably?

Finally had a clear night where I could get the new setup out on a real target. For the start of the season I've had my eye on M27 so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately I've found out my battery is far from adequate with the new setup, by the time I was photographing the battery was showing 11.4 V and I didn't dare to do more than just take a 60s sample each for the LRGB filters but I have to say the result is impressive considering. Still a bit new to editing so some of the stars have odd colours and fringing. I'm just so excited to see how low the noise is compared to my previous Canon DSLR and how good the signal is. This is going to be a fun season!

Or if I should perhaps have a more concrete question. Is it possible to see the RA backlash measured in the calibration? I've only seen it referenced as an output for the PHD2 guiding assistant.

One of the problems I was having before the summer was somewhat poor guiding and I haven't figured out if this is due to my mount, the guide scope or perhaps something I'm doing wrong with balancing, PA, etc. I've found some guide logs that I've been looking at but I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at or where I should pay attention. I've got the PHD2 log viewer and one of my sessions from January looks pretty decent, I've got an average of 1.38" total RMS which for my image scale is more than fine. However, looking at a later log from April it shows an average of 1.79" and I remember around this time having pretty poor guiding, even after starting to use multi-star guiding. My main suspect right now is my mount and I'm hoping the guide logs can help me confirm it. For one it's quite an old mount that I've bought second hand. On the controller board I've seen parts marked from -06 and -07 so likely at least 10 years old and I'm not sure if any maintenance has been done. If I try to move the RA axis by hand I can feel a bit of play, compared to the DEC axis which is rock solid. I'll post some logs, hopefully they'll tell a good story. guide_log-2021-04-03T21-48-41.txt guide_log-2021-07-21T23-49-10.txt guide_log-2021-01-26T19-05-16.txt

Someone care to explain the benefits of Astronomy Linux over running something like Ubuntu and kstars?

Mono certainly brings a lot of extra costs with filters and related equipment. I don't have a lot of experience with avoiding light pollution but from what I hear it's quite possible with OSC and correct filters. I was also interested in the 533 but also had my eye on 294 as they're in the same price range. You'll have to consider how you feel about the sensor format and amp glow. I believe those are the big differences. I don't remember the pixel sizes. Personally I made my choice about 3 weeks ago and went for mono. It's certainly put a strain on my wallet but I would really like to try playing the the narrow band filters and I feel that I'll be doing this for some time and I'm willing to put the time into it to learn and feel that I'm able to get as good results as possible.

I'll see if I can do it with more consistent and realistic temperatures. Thank you very much for the help!

I figured this sounded easy enough but I hit a slight snag. Which tools allow you stack using minimum? I checked both AstroPixelProcessor and DeepSkyStacker but they don't have options for minimum. So is it something you do manually in an editor like Photoshop or GIMP? EDIT: Even manually going through the bias frames in ImageJ I found an offset of 5 will give a minimum above 100. But from other comments I read that seems like a very low offset as people are saying even 8 which in some cases is default is very low. How temperature sensitive is this? I haven't exactly been running the cooling at max.

Thanks! Just a couple of questions. How do I find the minimum my camera outputs, is this some publicly available info or something I need to find by testing? What do I use to inspect the output values? I'm guessing there is some tool that can give something like a min pixel value?

Is there a methodology to determining what offset should be used with a camera? I understand it's somewhat individual but what kind of analysis can I do to find a good value or know that I have the wrong value?

Are you saying the FF might need to be set differently depending on if you have DSLR or astro camera? I've just got a mono camera and wondering if I should set my Flat73 differently. The WO instructions feel a bit unclear.

If possible I'd really like to stick with the existing solution, I like the way it currently works and it feels like a good method as long as I can get this little thing figured out. But it's certainly an alternative if this doesn't work out. Appreciate the help!

Not having much luck I'm afraid. I think this is because I'm running a remote computer physically on the rig which I connect to with my laptop and the settings aren't getting saved there. I tried playing around with the Upload settings in the INDI control panel but it doesn't seem to have much effect. The terminology is also getting me a little confused, "locally", "client", "remote" with respect to which computer are we talking?

Is there a way to set some default values for the camera in Ekos? Right now I seem to have an issue where if I forget to set the camera to bin 2x2 then the capture will fail without any helpful error message. It's very frustrating as well as the gain and offset never having a default value, just "--". The download location is also always locally while I want it remotely. This camera is new to me so I'll probably learn with time but I also want to save time and not have to set this up each session.

What are valid but extreme orientations of the mount you can try to verify that no cables are too short or at risk of snagging? I'd like to do somewhat tidy cable management but I'm worried I'll tie up some cable that for certain targets or some time of year might just try to stretch it too far. So I want to manually and slowly try some extremes. Is it just RA fixed and DEC 180 and vice versa and then both or am I overlooking something? Or should I set a slow speed and ask the mount to slew to something directly south?

I've just upgraded my camera from a DSLR to a mono and I'm looking what my second scope should be to complement my Z73. Newtons have always seemed like a good bargain but I've been a bit scared of the collimation, sometimes it seems trivial and other times I hear people never being able to manage it. From what I gather an f/5 shouldn't be too bad and I've gotten pretty interested in something like a 150/750 which would really let me photograph some of the smaller nebulae and make more galaxies available. Although a 200/800 would be sweet too if it's manageable collimating a faster scope. What makes me hesitant is I feel like people are often modifying and replacing things to get a decent experience or having trouble with accessories and balancing. So let's say I want to buy something like the TS Optics or Skywatcher 150/750 and use my mono equipment, including an electronic focuser, how carefree would my experience be out of the box? Even with my Z73 I experienced the included dovetail was all but worthless once the imaging equipment was attached. Is guiding typically done successfully from the finder shoe? Should I attach a dovetail on the top and try to balance out the camera with equipment on the primary mirror end? A coma corrector is implied, I don't feel a corrector of some sort differs from other scopes.

I really like the included bahtinov mask on my Z73 which is also neatly built in to the cap. Otherwise I felt the dovetail wasn't very useful as soon as you start putting camera and other stuff on it, you're really pushing it when it comes to balancing DEC.

Well I'm a little embarrassed/confused. I was about to start measuring voltage after I went buying a PCB holder and other stuff for soldering. I plugged in the cable and noticed the LED came on. Connected the controller board and plugged in the handset which seems to work just fine, slewing no problem. But I don't get why powering on the mount yesterday caused the serial communication with the PPB to fail, even though nothing but the power cable was connected to the mount. I haven't tried running the whole rig, so maybe it'll show the issue again. Perhaps the second cable I used wasn't good enough, I just opened it too and there's no fuse in it. But that's the cable I got with the mount. I feel like if it can handle the mounts requirements it should be able to just power on stuff. I dismantled the first cable I used yesterday which stopped working and sure enough the fuse is blown. That's an 8A fuse. I'll hold off on doing any more testing until I get some more input. I don't feel like an 8A fuse just blows for no reason. I'm powering from a 12 V battery which at the moment shows 12.6 V and that isn't going to suddenly unload high current unless there's a short. But where would that happen? The cables are all factory made and are not just going to switch polarity and everything is center positive.

Great advice and with the schematic below it helps so much! When applying voltage later, what sort of supply would be appropriate. I feel that I don't want to use the battery pack I normally use as it's able to supply quite a lot of current. So perhaps a mains supply with more limited current capacity is better? That is so helpful, I haven't gotten all the way through but so far it seems accurate! Thank you! I've had a good look at the electrolytic capacitors and they don't show any sign of damage. Doesn't mean they're fine but none of them went pop. From the schematic I can't see the power LED, it should be D3. It would be nice to know where that comes in as it didn't light up, so it's a clue of a power supply issue but I'd like to know how much it limits the search. EDIT: Managed to follow the trace and saw now that it's driven off one of the PICs I had no idea there were replacement boards. Would it really work for an older mount like mine? I've got the 16F73 I'm afraid. I really appreciate the suggestion!

You're right, of course. After seeing the L I realized it wasn't a capacitor. I'm not sure what could have happened to mine. I wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary and normal just plug the cigarette plug into the battery. But this time things just wouldn't quite start. I tried replugging my pegasus powerbox and that's when some sparks started flying but my guess is something was already broken by that time and caused the sparks rather than the other way around. Thanks a lot for the soldering tip. Yeah, I saw the L after I wanted to see if I could measure anything with a multimeter. I've got experience with soldering just not usually with these kinds of boards but I'm not too worried for the coil, it's quite big and easy to access. Do you have any ideas for any troubleshooting I can do before I start desoldering. I was wondering if it was worth getting a small variable power supply and set it to some low voltage and see if I can measure the supply and perhaps find some indication of a culprit that way.

I was about to do some testing tonight and started everything up like normal when suddenly things wouldn't connect. What I saw was my Pegasus Pocket PowerBox wouldn't connect but as I later noticed it wasn't even getting power because the power cable stopped delivering which I now believe is due to the mount shorting and burning the cable. I can't see anything wrong with the cable but I've confirmed with a multimeter and trying another cable. Apart from my mount no longer turning on I also noticed that when I tried turning it on while having everything else on the serial communication with my Pocket PowerBox would fail. Of course the mount is also powered through that unit. I'm hoping this is just a coincidence as I've just bought a new dedicated astro camera. This is one of the older models with the RS232-port. Are there any typical components that might fail or things that are worth investigating? I don't see anything that looks damaged but one of the bigger capacitors looks a bit suspicious. Any other options for getting this back in working order?

That's perfect! I didn't know you could see it for a time of day for the whole year. Now starts my wishlist of targets for the year. Creating a spreadsheet for planning/categorizing them and sorting for when the best time is to shoot them.

Right, very true! I wasn't considering the position during daylight. Unfortunately no, don't have any iPhone. Seems like an awesome app though!

Yeah, I guess the best way is to check with Stellarium. I was just hoping that if I had a list of targets I'm interested in that there would be a quick way to check without really knowing what time of year they're relevant. Alright, I guess I'm phrasing it a bit too general or misusing terms. From my location I would like to know what time of year an object is the highest over the horizon. For example, Orion doesn't make it over the Horizon this time of year but it gets a decent elevation around December/January.

Is it possible to find out what time of year a target will transit the highest? I know Orion is the best for me during some of the winter months but is it possible to find out after which date it starts to get lower again? I know telescopius will show transit but only for a specific date. Thanks