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Top 10 kit frustrations

MartinB

By MartinB
in The Astro Lounge

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MartinB

MartinB

Posted
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Is this scenario familiar - you've checked the forecast, every one of them, and it's going to be clear. You are going to do some imaging and have your target and session planned. With a lot of effort you get home from work only, incur the wrath of family for not giving them enough quality time and dash into garden and start setting up. Bring out all the kit, look up and polaris is now clear to see. Align guider, connect camera, organise the wires, connect laptop, polar align, switch on dew straps, align scope, focus camera and guider, slew to target...[glow=red,2,300]now what's the matter.....!!!!![/glow]

Here in no particular order are my top 10 angst generating problems with a rating for distress and for time lost

1) NS8 does cartwheels when I press autoalign. Hours of frustration. Repeatedly checked during the day when everything works fine. As soon as I do it in anger on a starry night it recurs. Eventually diagnosed as the effect of cold on the battery pack. Distress 8 Time lost 5

2) Backlash in Vixen Polaris mounts. Endless tweaking to of the gears but the amount of backlash changes very easily. Poor calibration and tracking. Solution - big offset to dec balance as well as offsetting RA balance to the East. Distress 9 time lost 9

3) Using adaptive optics for the first time getting the guider parfocal with the main camera is "tricky". Best practiced during the day. Doing this my SXV guider just returned a black screen, no histogram or anything. Returned to Ian King who found it to be fine. Solution - when fully saturated the chip shuts down and returns a dead, not a white screen. Don't saturate the chip with bright light doh!! Distress 5 Time lost 7

4) SXV camera wont send signals to GPDX mount. Hours spent under a starry sky adjusting calibration times, connecting and reconnecting. Solution - buried very deep in the SkySensor documentation - the wiring from SXV cameras needs reversing to work with SkySensor. Quick chat to Ian King and a £10 adaptor arrives the next day. distress 10 time lost 9.

5) Everything is connected and ready to roll. Maxim wont connect with SXV H9. Green light is on so it's powered up. Nothing. Reboot. No good. Reinstalled drivers, no good. Look up at sky - starry. Check all connections and reboot. Repeat this about 10 times. Solution - camera back to Ian King, USB connector appears to have been damaged (maybe I stood on a cable, SXV fixed it free of charge) Distress 10 Time lost 10

6) Try to set up fastar on NS8 for 1st time - the gasket on the secondary housing has perished and the whole of the secondary is wobbly. A dirve down to David Hinds and collect scope 1 month later. Distress 5 Time lost 10

7) Adaptive optics wont initialise - this was under a fantastic dark sky at Kelling. Quickly give up and switch to conventional guiding. Kind of give up with AO for a while but needs sorting with new set up. Solution - if the AO isn't centred before it is shut down then it might not be able to run it's initialisation routine properly. The glass then has to be centred manually using some small screws. Distress 6 Time lost 5

8) EM200 guiding erratically. That's just not supposed to happen. More endless tweaking with the setting in Maxim. Solution - saturated guidestar, problem sorted as soon as better star chosen. Distress 8 time lost 0 (the guiding was still just good enough)

9) An evening spent under a clear sky stuggling to set up LX200R and AO optics. Multitude of problems at the end of which the mount died. My all time worst evening spent trying to image. Solution - lots of little tweaks to the set up routine, EM200 handset lead plugs in internally and had come loose. Distress 10 Time lost 10

10) This one drives me nuts and I do it again and again :D At the very end of the set up routine, everthing is honed and ready to go. The guidestar has been chosen with great care. The exposure time is set, I just need to calibrate. Select calibrate and press start. Half a second later I hear the EM200 start to purr - S*** and derision!!! I've forgotten to switch the hand set from it's high speed slew setting to it's normal speed. So now it's off to god knows where. Distress 8 Time lost 4

There's plenty more - filter wheel sticking when it's cold, leaving the Telrad switched on so the battery goes flat, kicking the mount.... Actually it's very rare for the kit to properly malfunction. It's the knowing that there is probably a very simple explanation for the problem that really drives me nuts!! And that's one of the reasons I've done this. We might learn something from the problems of others.

So what are your most frustrating kit related moments (clouds and the neighbours security lights we all know about!)

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Cloudwatcher

Cloudwatcher

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When using the S/Newt on a Goto mount the eyepiece always seems to end up in the most inaccessible position for viewing known to man! :D I'm always rather loath to rotate the tube in it's rings whilst the goto is running for fear of causing damage to the mechanism. :lol:

CW

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Whippy

Whippy

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:D:lol: There's some crackers there Martin, some of which I'll no doubt be experiencing at some point..

Mine are essentially based on me not paying attention and being a dimwit.

The beginner's favourite: Entering the date in the wrong format the first time you set up your GOTO mount. Remember kids, it's mm/dd/yyyy not the other way around! I spent the whole evening cursing at my CG5GT because it was not going to where it was supposed to go, broke it all down, went inside and explained to L'Missus who said "Have you been entering the date correctly?" Grrrrrr......

Not charging battery for said mount and wondering why it's behaving oddly is another goodie.

Dew forming on eyepieces. Sorry, I'm just not buying a dew zapper for EP's. It's just wrong and I'd rather just change it. Call me stubborn, I don't care.

Not quite kit related but setting up, half an hour into session, eyes nicely dark adapted and the kids start playing up after putting them to bed an hour ago. Grrr... night eyes ruined. Luckily they don't do it too often because if they did.....

Tony..

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MartinB

MartinB

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:lol: :lol: There's some crackers there Martin, some of which I'll no doubt be experiencing at some point..

I spent the whole evening cursing at my CG5GT because it was not going to where it was supposed to go, broke it all down, went inside and explained to L'Missus who said "Have you been entering the date correctly?" Grrrrrr......

:lol::( Women eh!

Most of Martins problems come as a result of having a set up that would make the professional astronomers on Hawaii jealous....he just needs a maintenance team, :D

Any volunteers :occasion9:

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anthony

anthony

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Hmmmm.........so many.

Telrad left on. However, it does cope with this pretty well.

Hartmann mask left on the scope for 1 hour of data collection!

Not securing the azimuth screws on my pier mounted g11 and wondering why guiding was a pile of .........

Loosening the tube rings to slide the OTA forward a little rather than the dovetail. Swinging back to upright without tightening it!! Luckily it was just balance and pride that was knackered rather than anything else.

Taking all my blue exposures without having moved the filter wheel on from red! And so all my greens were blue. Quite a nice result in the end. see below.

Trying to roll the roof off without having lowered the scope enough.

Waling into the rails that my obs roof rolls off onto.

Bending down in the dark to peer through the finder scope and inadvertantly inserting a guide ring screw into my eye.

Not paying attention to my three year old who had wandered into the obs on one sunny day. I was playing music through the pc whilst I did a little bit of gardening. After five minutes the computer was communicating in french and all my filters, (stored in a box marked filters), were no

longer in said box - brief panic with that one but all ended well. They were carefully placed into a box marked adapters.

Anthony

post-12863-133877338146_thumb.jpg

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FLO

FLO

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As a regular observer my kit frustrations are minimal, but I really do feel the cold!

Am going to invest in a goose-down jacket and some thermal ski-pants!!!

Sorry, I know that's not what you were after but that's where I am at the moment.

Will be imaging before Spring Kelling so will have plenty of frustrations to discuss then :toothy5:

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Beyond_Vision

Beyond_Vision

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I can certainly sympathise with you Martin as the kit becomes more complicated there are so man things to remember.

Spent ages wondering why I couldn't see Polaris through my polar scope. The sky was reasonably clear the mount altitude was set correctly and was set up in the same place as before so I knew it was facing North. It should have been visible but nothing not one star. The protective cap was definitely removed. By this time I was pulling my hair out I was sure I had done all the normal things. Then I realised I hadn't pulled out the counter weight shaft so dully did that and still couldn't see anything. Much scratching of head later It suddenly dawned on me I had the DEC axis rotated through 90 degs because I had my new side by side plate fitted. So I rotated it back and bingo there was Polaris.

DOH another hour or so wasted and much stamping of feet and swearing.

Thats just one of many silly things I have done in the rush to get things set up. As they say less haste more speed.

Regards

Kevin

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Macavity

Macavity

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Uhm PRIMARILY lack of viable observing site. As a flat dweller, I am slowly resigned to the fact that skulking behind somone elses bedroom window at night ain't gonna work. If only because I can never really relax. :D

On a positive note, I feel I'm gonna reinvestigate my local Astronomical Society. Maybe I'm not the only one in such a situation? Maybe they have an adopt boring old f*rt - No wait ... "sparkling company", policy? :mrgreen:

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cygnusx1

cygnusx1

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It's reassuring to know im not the only one who feels that 99% of my time outside is a blasted waste of time some nights.

I mean this stuff is meant to be simple right, 1..2..3?? :insects1:

Some of my major timewasters and high blood pressure precipitators:

1. Get to end of 3 star align and goto decides to say "failed". Start again. This can happen a few times before it sorts itself out.

2. Trying to centre the image in my camaeras fov. this is a real PITA! If the object is very small i often spend ages taking shots, slight readjusting with goto, take another shot, repeat ad infinitum.

By the time i think i've got it sorted the object has set behind the trees!! BLAST it!! :D

3. Finding a guide star when using my Logitech webcam. I know it should be modified for long exposure, but im continually nudging N-S-E-W in the vain hope that a star will appear without moving the object out of my camera fov!

4. Dew. Ice. Frost. Dew.

Did i mention dew??

Other than that imagings a delight ( when i finally get a clear night with everything working before the sun rises :lol: )

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GazOC

GazOC

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I find it helps to have a good run of nights using the same kit, it becomes second nature and you remember what causes potential problems. I struggle when I only get out once every few weeks, its like learning from scratch (well, sort of!!)

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