Veil Focuser test

[PatrickGilliland]

Evening all,

After a bit of faffing around with imaging train to resolve some tilt managed to move on to fitting of custom built robofocus solution finally got my scope back after what seemed an age (2 weeks  ).

Of course it timed perfectly with a hectic week of work and a full moon and lots of cloud so managed to get out Wed night to set up FocusMax which was an interesting experience - worked first time except for the last focus image which system defaulted to 0.1 seconds - seems like an oversight when application calculated so many exposure times in the focus run you would have thought it could identified this value was not sufficient.  However it worked once I found this out and would advise any newbies to review all settings - I actually updated my *.ini files manually to alter a few bits that do not appear to save.  Little help for any first time users that may suffer the same issue.

A patient wait (yeah right, very frustrating wait) and had 1.5 hours of light before the moon came above my horizon to get a few shots.

V-Curve worked perfect getting < 1 FWHM's on focusing subs which is by far the best focus I have had on scope.  In short manual focusing for imaging on a fast scope is a skill I don't have and would recommend investment to anyone.

Only managed 2 x Ha/Oiii/Sii x 600 before moon interfered with veil which I selected for its brightness as new did not have much time.

Here is a that Ha and a sample colour - for 2 light subs was impressed and officially an advocate of auto-focusers now!

And finally apologies - now I have a working rig I am obviously totally responsible for cloudy nights for at least next two weeks.

Paddy

[Martin-Devon]

That's a very promising start on the focusing Paddy, and well done with getting to grips so quickly with FocusMax - it took me weeks to get my head around this piece of software, but now it all seems relatively straightforward once you understand what the settings do.

Martin

[PatrickGilliland]

Cheers Martin, now a case of waiting for a number of nights and collecting sufficient data to make a nice image from.

Paddy