AMcD

We do not - I am not sure what the equivalent is here...

Suffolk. My grandfather used to use the phrase regularly and my mother and uncles still do from time to time. A

Meteoblue Weather radar showing a large snow shower heading directly for the observatory and it is "black over Will's mother's" as they used to say where I grew up - but looks like clear skies once it has passed. Three targets lined up in SGP. Now if only I can get plate solving to work...

Indeed! Based on a reply in the SGP forum another possible problem I have identified is that I had the Gemini set to expect J2000 co-ordinates. SGP uses J2000 but converts them to JNOW before sending them to the G11. Therefore the “Gemini expects J2000 co-ordinates” box must be unchecked in the Gemini.net interface. Otherwise the G11 will think it has been sent J2000 co-ordinates by SGP and centres at what it thinks is the correct J2000 position. When the second plate-solve happens it will see that the G11 is still off by reference to JNOW and send the same JNOW solution co-ordinates again. The G11 however, will again read them as J2000 and think it has already moved to those co-ordinates and will not move again. In short, unless the “Gemini expects J2000 co-ordinates” box is unchecked, after the first plate-solve SGP keeps saying “move” and the G11 keeps replying “why, I am already there.” I suspect it is possible that this is the same problem that can occur if the G11 has a detailed pointing model active. SGP will send the G11 co-ordinates based on the first plate-solve and the G11 will move having regard to its active pointing model. If the model cannot match the accuracy of a plate-solve (as it generally will not) then when the second plate-solve happens it will see that the G11 is still off (by reason of defects in it’s pointing model) and send the same solution co-ordinates again. The G11 however, will, by reference to its pointing model, think it has already moved to those co-ordinates and will not move again. Once more, in short the presence of the detailed Pointing model means that after the first plate-solve SGP keeps saying “move” and the G11 keeps replying “why, I am already there.” When these interminable clouds clear I will try the solutions of (a) unchecking the “Gemini expects J2000 co-ordinates” box and (b) not using a pointing model and post the results.

Many thanks for this. I suspect the equivalent in the Gemini to turning off syncing in EQMOD is to cold start the Gemini each time it is powered up, forego the initial alignment star routine and uncheck "Sync performs additional align". This should ensure that Gemini does not build an alignment model with the attendant sync points and therefore does not fight the plate solver. I will give this a try. Many thanks again.

I have also posted this query on the SGP forum but wondered if any one here on SGL has encountered this problem. I am attempting to use ‘Slew and Centre’ in SGP with Plate Solve 2 on an older Losmandy G11 mount with Gemini I as part of my imaging sequence. The problem is that after the first Plate Solve the Dec px error reduces to within an acceptable pixel tolerance but, whilst the RA px error also reduces on the first plate solve, all further plate solves make no difference to the RA px error. The result is that centring ultimately fails and the sequence aborts. I have read that this might be the result of SGP fighting the pointing model in the Gemini I. In any event, is there a solution / set of settings that will resolve this issue, for example by eradicating the Gemini’s pointing model?

Sequence Generator Pro lists two ZWO Focuser options in the drop down menu for selecting a focuser (ZWO Focuser (1) and ZWO Focuser (2)). Does this mean that SGP can distinguish between two ZWO Focusers mounted on a side by side set-up? If so, how do you identify which focuser is ZWO (1) and which is ZWO (2) for the purpose of constructing the equipment profile for each of the two scopes? I know that SGP cannot run two set-ups at once (although I believe it is possible to run two instance of SGP at the same time) but it would good (funds permitting) to have a ZWO EAF on each scope on the side by side set-up when selecting equipment profiles, rather than having to move one ZWO focuser between two scopes or having two different brands of focuser.

You are not wrong - less than 24 hours from order to delivery of the mini version! Thanks to you and tooth_dr for the advice.

I am looking to purchase a new guide camera following the sad passing of my trusty Meade DSI III, which has stood me in good stead for guiding for over a decade. I will be using the new guide camera with a 60mm Altair Astro finder/guide scope. Any recommendations or advice to inform my search would be gratefully received.

Thanks for the tip re a dew heater on the QHY8 MakeItSo. It has solved the icing problem very nicely.

I have spent the last two days working on the metal plate for mounting the mini-PC and Pegasus PBA. I am pretty happy with the results, although still concerned about the weight of the finished product. I may try and do some more drilling / milling in the future to try and get rid of some more of the weight but am at present limited by my basic tools (and absence of metal working experience!). In the meantime, you could drive a tank over it and it would probably still not flex...

In circumstances where lockdown requires me now to work mainly from home, with things therefore more easily to hand during the week, I have decided to spend my evenings now trying to improve the mounting of my mini-PC and the new Pegasus Power Box Advance that arrived this week. I have never been very happy with having the mini-PC mounted on a wooden backboard. It is not very stiff and, to be frank, it is not very attractive. Against this, I could not find a metal plate that was the right size and the plates that are available are quite expensive. So I have decided to try my hand at fabricating one myself. I have ordered a small slab of aluminum (150mm x 400mm x 8mm and £23 on eBay) and will now attempt to drill it with all the holes I need plus sufficient for future expansion / re-organisation of the gear. The first issue that I have run into is that the slab is pretty heavy. In the off the shelf examples this is addressed by liberal drilling and milling to remove large amounts of surplus metal whilst maintaining structural integrity in the plate. Given that I have a power drill and a small drill press to put it in, I suspect I will be limited to drilling holes! Now the Pegasus PBA has arrived I am also going to try using a dew heater to address the frosting issue on the QHY8.

Many thanks wimvb - I had not thought of this but it is an excellent solution. Given the weather we seem to be having at the moment it would be very good to be able to take advantage of good conditions immediately they arise from wherever I happen to be.

Many thanks for this excellent advice. Happily, I have a birthday coming up so I am hoping that Pegasus will be the beneficiary of some spending by those near and dear to me! With respect to the Talon, my roll-off observatory was built by Alexander Observatories some years ago now. The roof runners are very solid and have lasted those years well but they comprise plastic castors running in wide aluminum channels rather than metal v-shaped castors on metal rails. In the circumstances, the roof can exhibit some lateral 'play' when it rolls off and back on. Am I likely to need a v-shaped wheel / rail roll off mechanism in order to use the Talon reliably?

Hi Brutha, Before I invested in a roll-off roof observatory I had my scope on a pier that was bolted to a concrete foundation in the middle of a patio. I left the scope mounted on it all year under a TeleGizmos 365 cover (see TeleGizmos Telescope Covers [2] | First Light Optics). Apart from the odd spider incursion, the cover protected the scope from all levels of bad weather throughout the year over the course of 3 or 4 years. As you rightly surmise, a pier makes using the scope much, much more convenient. The mount can remain polar aligned from session to session and, apart from attaching cables etc., the scope is ready to go as soon as the cover is removed. It also helped very much with vibrations. I found that the pier meant I spent many more nights under the stars than I had done when I had to set everything up from scratch for each session. Overall, I think it is a very worthwhile thing to do. A

My experience of amateur astronomy over the years has taught me that the question should never be "what went wrong?" but rather, "what have I learnt?". I accept that this is sometimes easier said than done. I tried running my first remote sequence this evening. I was, as planned, able to execute most of this from the warmth of my study (having had to go outside to roll the roof off, turn on the Gemini and, in the current absence of an electronic focuser, check the focus on the TS6!) The demonstration version of SGP worked very well in allowing me to create an ordered sequence of actions from slewing to the target, plate solving to centre the target, commencing autoguiding and taking the image frames. SGP slewed the scope to M31 (the specified target) and commenced autoguiding with PHD2. The problem came with the plate solver. I am using ASTAP via SGP, which continually failed to solve a plate with M31 partially out of the frame, the Gemini being fairly accurate but not perfect (I could have simply centred M31 manually but I was keen to see the 'centre' feature of SGP in action). The online version of Astrometry.net did eventually manage to solve the plate but only when I ran the 'centre' function independent of my saved sequence. I need to look into the failure of ASTAP to solve the plate but I suspect it may have had something to do with the less than ideal seeing conditions (with quite a lot of high cloud) and/or the next problem I encountered. I am running a classic QHY8 on my TS6 achromatic refractor. Whilst the QHY8 has a desiccant tube, a heated ring and is kept in a sealed box with a silicone gel heater it (you guessed it) iced up very quickly. I thought I had solved this problem with careful storage, but it is back. Needless to say, this eventually produces all sorts of interesting shapes on the image which will definitely defeat a plate solver. I however, wonder whether this was what was happening even before they became apparent on the image and impacting on ASTAP's ability to solve the plate. At this point the clouds rolled in and I was denied any further experimentation, let alone any good imaging data of M31. I have learnt that the setup was relatively easy to control using SGP via the MS Windows 10 Remote Desktop/LAN connection between the house and the observatory. I have learnt that this will be even more the case once I am able to invest in an electronic focuser, filter wheel , field rotator, TALON roof opener etc. I have also learnt that I need to work on understanding ASTAP and that I will have to find another solution to the icing problem on the QHY8. I know there are a number of options, including the use of a drill and some rubber tube! I did however, for the first time, steer my scope to the broad vicinity of its intended target from the comfort of the house. All in all, I intend to call this evening a score draw...

The Talon and a Cloudwatcher are on my wish list, as is a Pegasus APB or Hitec Mounthub Compact as I have a lot of power cable spaghetti at the moment.

I have managed to get everything connected. All the equipment appears to to talking to the mini-pc on the mount and the mini-pc to indoor computer LAN connection remain fast and reliable over a 50M Cat 7 Ethernet cable. The wireless connection to the CCTV camera has remained stable. Things have been made much easier with the newer versions of ASCOM and Gemini.net which seem, to me at least, to allow multiple programmes (PHD2, Cartes du Ceil and SGP trial version) to connect concurrently to the Losmandy Gemini much more reliably than they used to. It occurs to me that when the observatory and indoor computers are connected it should be possible then to connect to the indoor computer from a third computer, via MS Remote Desktop, for truly remote operation. However, as I say, walking before running!

You are not wrong Steve. I just get one thing sorted and then something I thought was sorted becomes 'unsorted'. Perhaps that is the defining characteristic of the hobby of astronomy, or at least of the hobby of astrophotography. I laid the hardwire LAN connection today and, after an afternoon of head scratching regarding IP addresses, now have the computers talking to each other over an ethernet connection which, needless to say, is much more stable and much faster than the wireless.

As I have got older I am increasingly disinclined to stand in the cold for hours trying to obtain passable astro-photos. I am still however, willing to sit in the warm and spend hours trying to obtain passable astro-photos. I have over the past decade set up an observatory in my back garden using mostly second hand equipment. I now have a Celestron C8 with Fastar that I bought second hand in 1999, a WO Zenithstar 66mm Apo that I purchased new in the US some ten years ago and a TS6 achromatic refractor that I purchased second hand last year. The Zenithstar is piggybacked on the C8 and is used with a second hand Starlight Xpress SXV-M7 for guiding with PHD2. I have an original QHY8, again purchased second hand, that I use with the TS6 or the Fastar and Nebulosity. The mount is a second hand Losmandy G11 with a late Gemini I system attached that I purchased from California some 15 years ago . The observatory is from Alexander Observatories. My aim is to be able to control the mount and equipment from my study in the house. As I work away, it would also be nice to be able to have the capacity for truly remote operation, but one step at a time. It seemed to me that the minumum requirements for remote operation from the comfort of the house were (a) the ability to reliably control the mount and cameras using a remote computer, (b) the ability to reliably see the equipment in the observatory whilst using it remotely and (c) the ability, ultimately, to remotely control the observatory roof, which control would have to have built in safety features to prevent weather and impact damage to the equipment. For remote control of the mount and equipment, I decided to use Windows 10 Pro Remote Desktop to communicate between a computer in the observatory and a computer in my study. Whilst I was attracted to a Windows based system that could be piggybacked on the scopes, I was not willing to pay the high price of bespoke systems like the Primaluce Eagle 3. The solution I arrived at was a HNSUN industrial mini-computer purchased from Amazon for £290. It has a 128G solid state drive, 8G of RAM and has Windows 10 Pro pre-installed. It is also small enough to mount on the TS6 notwithstanding that it has four serial ports, four USB3 ports and four USB2 ports, as well as two LAN ports. Its only drawback is that it does not have the power ports for astro-equipment that solutions like the Eagle 3 Pro give. But it is over £1000 cheaper! Using a wooden backboard, I mounted the mini-PC on top of the TS6's scope rings. On the mini-pc is installed the software for controlling the mount and the cameras via ASCOM and Gemini.net scripts. At present, the computer in my study and the mini-pc on the scope communicate wirelessly over our household broadband, which reaches the observatory by virtue of a wi-fi range extender. Remote Desktop replicates the mini-pc's desktop on the computer in my study, allowing me to control the mount and the cameras. I hope shortly to introduce digital focusing. It is becoming clear however, that this wireless link is not the most reliable. In particular, when others are using up bandwidth the link drops out relatively regularly. As such, I have decided to install a hardwire LAN link between the two computers by running a Cat 7 LAN cable from my study to the observatory. This will involve drilling a hole through the outside wall and running the cable out from the house to the observatory. To view the equipment as it being used, I have installed a Reolink wireless CCTV camera in the observatory, which can be viewed wirelessly on the computer in the study. This allows me to keep an eye on things and to make sure the mount is doing what the programmes on the remote desktop are telling me it is doing. It will also in due course permit me to check that the scopes are parked before the roof shuts and that the roof has closed at the end of the session. The wireless link to the CCTV camera seems to be a lot more stable than that to the mini-pc, perhaps due to using less bandwidth. As to the roof, I am now investigating options for automating the roof. I think the Talon systems looks to be the gold standard but, again, the price for such a bespoke unit is commensurate with its specialist / dedicated nature. Any cheaper ideas would be very gratefully received. The challenge now is to point the scope, centre the target and take the pictures without leaving the house. Wish me luck!

I have engaged in amateur astronomy on and off for over forty years. As a child I had a small and rickety Tasco refractor. As the delights and distractions of my teenage years took hold I put away what I mistakenly considered childish things. Building a career took me further still from the hobby. But I never forgot the concluding comments in the small instruction book that came with the Tasco telescope. It told me that whilst the flame of the hobby may sputter and dim from time to time, it will never go out. And it has never gone out. Over the past ten years I have slowly put together an observatory, my work life again taking me away from this endeavour for months or years at a time. As I get older, I find myself less inclined to stand in the cold, so am now engaged in a project to introduce remote operation that I hope will let me engage in astrophotography from the comfort of my study. I find the help and advice of other amateurs to be one of the best things about the hobby and am looking forward to learning from those whose knowledge is infinitely greater than mine, A