Spoon's HEQ5 first light!

[Spoon]

Right then. Here goes my first ever first light review.

Ok so, 4:45, take the mount out mount out with a massive grin of anticipation on my face, everything seems good at this point (this is my first time with a Skywatcher hand controller so bare with me for a bit [emoji6]) got polar aligned, really love that illuminated reticule it's so useful. Got aligned to 3 stars, first two were really close, the third however was massively out of sight. Big disappointing. So I carried on in excitement.

Told the mount to go to a bright star to get the focus spot on with the camera. Did that, fine. Went to another star on the other side of the sky, WAY WAY out of the field of view of my big camera chip (almost 4000x2500) so probably a rookie error. Then, the worst happened, the power supply cut out as my supply is like a laptop charger and I hadn't pushed them together fully. So my mistake there. Stupid me.

So this meant realigning again! This time, but this time the mount went to the other side of the zenith. Fail.. So. Tried again you know thinking 3rd time lucky. This time turned out very well. Stars were in the middle of the crosshairs EVERY TIME. Then, guess what. I pulled the power chord away from its little laptop box thingy (alternator I think it's called, correct me if I'm wrong. I usually am.). At this point I was getting mad with myself. Deserved a slap round the head **slap**. Ok so I did it AGAIN! 4th time lucky he said...

Ok so this time it worked. Thought "great, after being out for 3 hours so far it might all come together. Then comes the guiding. This really messed me over tonight. At first it wasn't connecting to PHD. I thought, I wonder why? Then I realised: I hadn't changed ASCOM from Celestron Driver to HEQ5 [emoji23][emoji23] I'm such an idiot! Won't do it again though (famous last words...). PHD then said ASCOM cannot IsPulseGuide or something like that.

After a while I consulted steppenwolf (Steve). He's the GoTo guy (get the pun .... **SLAP**) for anything astrophotography I think. Very clever guy. Knows his stuff! So he then said: is your mount set to ASCOM PulseGuiding in EQMOD?" Low and behold, it wasn't, changed it over. It worked!

Then another problem. Star didn't move enough in RA **messages Steve "why is this happening"** and once again he solved it and then I looked at the graph of guiding... The EQMOD window was covering it: heart rate doubled at this point in worry something had gone wrong. What I saw was the best guiding graph I've ever produced!! Just goes to show how much difference a good mount makes to guiding and accuracy!

So overall, a lot was my fault, but the mount performed extremely well after I got everything sorted it's currently imaging M1 the Crab Neb in Taurus at 600sec subs in the ED80. Can't wait to see the results! Now where's that new guider I need to order.....

Will post a better, proper review when I get a good session. Might stick a 200p for visual on it see how it fairs!

I know I ramble on a lot, and go off topic, but thanks for reading!

Cam

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Tinker1947]

So your be leaning towards a permanent set-up, as what happened tonight won't be a one off.....

[Spoon]

So your be leaning towards a permanent set-up, as what happened tonight won't be a one off.....

We are Moving house in early jan, and I've allocated myself a patch of the garden for a roll off shed

[Tinker1947]

We are Moving house in early jan, and I've allocated myself a patch of the garden for a roll off shed

That's what you need, just roll off and switch on........with a warmroom...

[Spoon]

That's what you need, just roll off and switch on........with a warmroom...

Warm room is also called the sitting room