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A Night of Horror at the Observatory

Alveprinsen

By Alveprinsen
in The Astro Lounge

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Thalestris24

Thalestris24

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Well, the contacts are the problem... Seems they get smaller in the cold, and loses connection if I so much as touch them.

In room temperature however, wiggling them does not disconnect them.

Earlier this evening when calibrating PHD guiding I touched the laptop... it moved slightly... and connection was thus broken and I had to start all over again. I heard that "disconnect / connect" sound in Windows two times...

Happened to me tonight in the cold too! Also at the laptop end. I'll have to have a think about what might be a fix.

Edit: Might be worth posting a separate thread - I'm sure others must have had this problem and hopefully found a way round it.

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Alveprinsen

Alveprinsen

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Went down to the obsy this morning.. 05:55. took some flats and bias frames.

PHD Guiding and my Orion Starshoot Autoguider kept trying to track the star, but the mount had stopped due to "limits", so it was making that annoying "error noise" again and again.

Other than that I had an error message from Backyard EOS saying it had some sort of error and "stopped working", although it kept taking exposures. Backyard EOS didnt close until I pressed "ok" on the error message.

I looked through the exposures, and it seems I had gotten quite a few good ones except the last hour or so which was smudged because of the lack of tracking.

I've taken images and video of the error messages etc, and will upload once I get back home from work.

Perhaps there is some default limit / peer setting I need to either disable or change... Because the mounth and scope could have kept twisting and rotating for a good hour or two more before crashing into the tripod or anything....

Alveprinsen

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Alveprinsen

Alveprinsen

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Hi

There are mount limit settings in eqmod. Glad you got some image data!

Louise

Sure did...

Combined with my old exposures I'm now up to 7h 46 minutes in total:

PICTURE LINK

Seems imaging at almost full moon isn't that bad. Although it creates some serious gradient. And as previously mentioned, I needed to tune down from 600s exposures at ISO1600 to 240sec at ISO800.

The picture is the best I can do with photoshop and lightroom w/o any fancy plugins.

What I really need is Pix-insight, but... its so damn expensive. :(

EDIT: Gonna have a look at those limits first chance I get... Need to watch a YouTube vid on it again first tho. Its more than a year since I last did that...

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Thalestris24

Thalestris24

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What's the target? I do all my dslr imaging at iso 400 since I had it modded otherwise the lp just burns it out. And that's with just 180s...

It's coming up as a somewhat narrow rectangle on my display? Can you not just post the jpg? (I don't really trust files via Dropbox)

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Alveprinsen

Alveprinsen

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What's the target? I do all my dslr imaging at iso 400 since I had it modded otherwise the lp just burns it out. And that's with just 180s...

It's coming up as a somewhat narrow rectangle on my display? Can you not just post the jpg? (I don't really trust files via Dropbox)

7h45minCLIPPED

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Alveprinsen

Alveprinsen

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I'm no expert on sky objects - I only know what I can see in the East up to 35 deg alt! Looks like you need flats?

Got flats...

What you see there is more dust... dust in which I have yet to get out any details. Need more exposures. So for now it looks kinda greyish. Other than that, there is gradient from the moon... which I will need to remove.

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Thalestris24

Thalestris24

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Got flats...

What you see there is more dust... dust in which I have yet to get out any details. Need more exposures. So for now it looks kinda greyish. Other than that, there is gradient from the moon... which I will need to remove.

Ok - it's a bit small and I can't see it too well.

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PhotoGav

PhotoGav

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Hooray - data has been acquired of an astronomical target, congratulations! That's a nice process of it too. As for PI - I look forward to hearing how you get on with it... I haven't dared go there yet. GradientXTerminator plug-in for PS is well worth the trial and worth purchasing too!

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Alveprinsen

Alveprinsen

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Hooray - data has been acquired of an astronomical target, congratulations! That's a nice process of it too. As for PI - I look forward to hearing how you get on with it... I haven't dared go there yet. GradientXTerminator plug-in for PS is well worth the trial and worth purchasing too!

hehe... about time, wasn't it?

I played around in pixinsight a bit just now:

7h45min Stretched ABE Edited 3 3

I think I may have over done it a bit... banding is starting to show, and noise is really showing too. I guess I've been trying too hard to bring out too much detail with too little data to go on... Then tried to smooth things over with some noise reduction, but... I dont know.. Gonna have to watch a couple of tutorials over the weekend I guess. Pixinsight scares me...... :eek:
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Alveprinsen

Alveprinsen

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You can just upload and post a jpg...

I honestly dont know how to do that. I only know how to pick images from "my gallery" - using the "My Media" button. I just uploaded two huge files there. But when klick'ing them they are over an extremely average size... hmmm

Edit: Done :D

Edit 2: Or maybe not... uhm... Anyhow - going to sleep. :)

post-27347-0-80024400-1417642558_thumb.j

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Alveprinsen

Alveprinsen

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Ahh, another glorious day at the Observatory of horrors...

The other day I had like.... another 9 hours of clear skies. Of little use though, since both primary and secondary mirror was completely iced over.

So - I brought the damn thing into my house to de-frost and dry the damn thing up.

Meanwhile, I took a shot with my Vixen Polarie using my modified camera and a vintage 200mm Takumar Pentax 200mm lens instead.

Failures seem to be the rule rather than the exception for me these days... Take-two with my 200mm lens last night resulted in this little disaster.

Anyhow, tonight I got home from work early.. ready to clock in as many hours of exposures as possible... M78... my dream object from last year... Remember? That whole year I waited for a camera that never arrived... This was the moment...

So...

1. Had to re-align the scope because it had been detatched. Spendt about three hours trying to find Jupiter. (yeah, its right there... I know... just not in frame...) I thought I'd found it a few times, although I thought it looked too much like a star. Not the Jupiter I remembered... And right I was.. No wonder I missed every single object on the sky by a mile... I had centered on a bright star instead... So, after three hours, I by chance find Jupiter, and my alignments go easy from here.

2. Its already 02:00 - having wasted several hours, I now only had like 2-3 hours left - and the object would be so low on the horizon the images would most likely be Rubbish anyway...

3. Rubbish is best served cold. (-7 degrees)

post-27347-0-31830600-1418795304_thumb.j

Ahh, glorious gradient, and do I detect a touch out-of-focus? My favorite combination...

I checked the mirrors before packing up for the evening (or should I say morning), and noticed there was some rhime on the primary mirror at least. I didnt check secondary - but its a given that there would be rhime on that too.

So I am thinking - either quit - or get a freaking Skywatcher Explorer 190MN DS-PRO.

I want something I can slap a freaking heating strip on... Something with a virtually maintenance free tube. I want closed optics, but with the aparture of a reflector...

PS: I consider this thread my own personal Wailing Wall. I hope my lashing out at the universe at least diminishes the feelings your own failures - hopefully providing a silver lining to what I assume is a typically clody british day. ;)

Alveprinsen.

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