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Hello from Hither Green

brancusi

By brancusi
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brancusi

brancusi

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The story so far ... way back in 2001, I moved from London to Yorkshire and bought a LX90 to indulge my long standing fascination with the cosmos. I was just starting to get the hang of things and upgraded from a modified webcam to a second hand ST-8E camera just before work commitments dragged me back to a flat in London and the telescope was consigned to the cupboard.

This is a sample image from the webcam - it's not great, but it definitely spurred me on.

jupiteragain.jpg

Fast forward to 2013 and we now have a house with garden - aka observatory location. Over the years I've lost the tripod for the LX90 and the wedge and so this year I've decided to get things sorted again and have de-forked the LX-90 and today, my shiny new AZ-EQ6 arrived from Ian King and is sitting in the living room with the LX90 mounted and looking splendid!

I've a few challenges to overcome ... my ST-8E is the old parallel version and I never got around to the USB upgrade - which of course isn't available any more (I've checked with SBIG). Plan B is the ethernet to parallel adapter, but they seem like Hens' teeth to find. So plan C is to see if I can get CCDOPS installed on an old IBM Thinkpad I've found which has a direct parallel port. Alas the laptop that had all my astro software on it - MaximDL etc was stolen back in 2004 and of course the modern stuff won't support my ageing camera - but I'm reasonably resourceful and happen to be a software engineer for a global tech company so I'm hopeful I can at least get things up and running to some extent. I'd be gutted if I had to upgrade the camera as that would seem such a waste and the ST-8E spec doesn't seem so bad, even these days.

Plan for the weekend is to fit the external power to the house and then set things up at the back of the garden :-) Whether I get as far as first light is somewhat dependent on my software wrangling skills, but I'll get there at some point!

Loving the forums here - lots of great advice and looking forward to discussing imaging workflows once I actually achieve first light in the new location!

Roger

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carastro

carastro

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Hi Roger,

I'm just down the road from you in Bromley.  We're fighting a bit of a losing battle with LP in our neck of the woods, but don;t let it get us down.

The LX should be great for planetary imaging, and you've bought a good mount capable of DS imaging as well.

Carole 

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brancusi

brancusi

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Thanks for the kind welcome all - my new AZ-EQ6 arrived last week and it's now sitting indoors with my de-forked LX90 atop and the ST-8E on the back. Being parallel only, the ST-8E represents a bit of a challenge but I found an old Thinkpad with a parallel port on the base station and so am planning on using that for imaging and guiding. Yesterday was software day and I had the fun of discovering that Stellarium no longer works without open gl v2 which the thinkpad didn't support, but after a downgrade to a previous version that seemed sorted and then I was able to install Ascom, EQAscom and Stellarium Scope without incident.

At about 9pm last night, switched everything on and had the computer control all working - plus about an hour later, remote control of the laptop sorted so that it can live in the shed and I can control it all from the warmth of the conservatory.

Next step is camera control - have to find my old ccdops cd or a download of Maxim DL that I used to use - that'll need to be an old version too in order to hook up to the camera.

Still -all good fun and something to do when it's raining - as of course it is having bought a new mount.

Looking forward to posting first light ...

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