Do the experienced guys still have unsuccessful nights?

[ChrisLX200]

Yep, computer problems will never go away completely I think, maybe because we always run MS updates (Windows users anyway). Other than that my stuff is reliable right now but I don't think there's any part of it that hasn't caused a problem in the past (exception being the new mount which hasn't been used long enough yet!).

ChrisH

[Knight of Clear Skies]

It's surprising how many basic mistakes I can make in a single evening still.

[fatwoul]

I don't know what you consider to be experienced.  I've been imaging on and off for 20 years, and imaging seriously for 5.  

Right now I have flexure, CCD condensation, and last week I spent 4 hours imaging NGC1499 with it lying the wrong way across the sensor.  And then did the same with NGC7000.

Last winter, all my equipment got rained on when a cloud appeared out of a clear sky whilst I was asleep.  Nothing seemed to be broken, but my mount made weird noises for a week.

Not long ago, a spider made a web across the front of my newtonian.  I spent 45 minutes at dawn, in my dressing gown, peering into the tube to try and find the spider, because I was worried it would make webs over the mirrors if I left it there.  After an extensive search I found it on the outside of the tube.

I bang my head on the door of my observatory 25% of the time I enter/leave.

[r3i]

I don't know what you consider to be experienced.  I've been imaging on and off for 20 years, and imaging seriously for 5.  

Right now I have flexure, CCD condensation, and last week I spent 4 hours imaging NGC1499 with it lying the wrong way across the sensor.  And then did the same with NGC7000.

Last winter, all my equipment got rained on when a cloud appeared out of a clear sky whilst I was asleep.  Nothing seemed to be broken, but my mount made weird noises for a week.

Not long ago, a spider made a web across the front of my newtonian.  I spent 45 minutes at dawn, in my dressing gown, peering into the tube to try and find the spider, because I was worried it would make webs over the mirrors if I left it there.  After an extensive search I found it on the outside of the tube.

I bang my head on the door of my observatory 25% of the time I enter/leave.

Welcome to my world

[Rush]

NGC 7000 and me quiet a long story.Camera bangs and Hangs on the Tripod till dawn.

Gave up imaging near Zenith.Avoid dark locations these days .Once i had to hide in my car for a while cos a huge female boar came out of bush with her newborn family all dressed in striped jerseys and darting all around the place.One evening i opned the door of my astronomy shed and i was greeted by wasps from their newly built nest behind the mount.Now im trying to be happy with my little west balcony:)

Like the mate above,keep on banging my head on the upperpart of the door frame.

Its hard to explain this oddjob as a hobby.

Cs again

[goose35]

i hav`nt been doing this long either and ive gone from 100% to 80% on the non sucess front but im still experimenting and learning. Even so things often go off the rails usually tech issues rather than human issues these days, it was both at the start

[Macavity]

Ah yes, I'd forgotten the danger aspect. Releasing an unbalanced mount...

and simultaneously pinching fingers and receiving the blow to the head!  

[Pompey Monkey]

I'm certainly not an "experienced guy", but I've had some experiences.

Last week, I went away for ten minutes only to find that the laptop was complaining that it was not connected to the DSLR. Investigations revealed that the mains lead part of my camera power adapter had completely vanished. I got all paranoid and worried that some kids had come over the fence and were playing games with me....

...In the morning I found the lead in pieces, all chewed up, on the lawn. It turned out to be the local fox. I still don't quite understand how he/she managed to unplug a UK 13A plug from the extension lead....

[michael8554]

Without getting electrocuted too....

Michael

[Uranium235]

Yep, every so often things go a bit wrong - the worst kind of session killer is if you have to take the scope back indoors... death by condensation!

[ollypenrice]

Martin's right about not changing things. That is the one biggest and best anti-gremlin technique. Why don't I simplify the cables with an Astro Hub? Why don't I use auto focus?  Answer: because these would be changes! 

By not changing anything at all I do generally get reliability but all my gear is chosen with that in mind. As a provider it is the most important single thing to aim for.

And so to last night when the Atik EFW2 refused to communicate with the PC after any number of power cycles and USB in and outs and capture software restarts. I've had this before on occasion and, as usual, it worked fine this morning... Meanwhile over on the other side of the tandem a large blob of something found its way onto the SXV chip window. So there you go! Oh, and the mount needs a tweak in polar alignment. Why? Not a clue!

Olly

[toxic]

what a wonderful hobby this is, you don't get this kind of excitement with golf 

[StargeezerTim]

I'm not that experienced, been doing this fairly seriously for about six months.

I get inspiration from this site and ideas about what to image. Three nights ago I thought I would image NGC 7822. Got a couple of photos off the net as usual. Both had a wispy slither of nebulosity on the right of the image.

GoTo has been working well lately and sure enough, when I went to NGC 7822 and I took a quick image of it, there was the nebulosity on the right hand side of the sub. A couple more to check guiding then I set it up to take three hours worth of 5 min subs. Following morning, transfer the subs and calibration frames from my DSLR memory card to the computer and begin stacking in DSS.

You know what is coming next? A nice image of nothing. The wispy bit was there but the DSO was on the other side of it. The image was inverted so missed NGC 7822 entirely. So a nice image of a bit of nebulosity and nothing! 3 hours of nothing...

Would have wanted to get back in the saddle straight away but the moon had other ideas. Try again in a couple of weeks. Cest La vie...

Tim. 

[steppenwolf]

No matter how experienced you are or how sophisticated your equipment is there is always the propensity for failure but as with so many things in life, how you deal with the failure can make all the difference!

My most recent failure was using a different camera to normal and manually focusing for the first set of images on the first night in which I collected a whole two frames before the clouds rolled in but then relying on auto-focusing on the second night forgetting that the pixel scale and other attributes were different from those expected by the calibrated auto-focus profile, Doh! This resulted in three hours of slightly out of focus subs from the one shot colour camera in use - grrrrrr

Not wishing to waste the session, I stacked the two data sets separately, extracted a dummy Luminance channel from the in focus data, used the out of focus data as my RGB channels and produced a not too shabby LRGB image!

Now, if only I could find a solution to my favourite '2 hours of cloud images' failure when I haven't received the email telling me that the guide star has been lost ........

Sent from my iPhone from somewhere dark .....

[Davey-T]

And so to last night when the Atik EFW2 refused to communicate with the PC after any number of power cycles and USB in and outs and capture software restarts. I've had this before on occasion and, as usual, it worked fine this morning..

Olly

Snap, I feel better now it's not only me and my EFW2 

Dave

[ollypenrice]

No matter how experienced you are or how sophisticated your equipment is there is always the propensity for failure but as with so many things in life, how you deal with the failure can make all the difference!

My most recent failure was using a different camera to normal and manually focusing for the first set of images on the first night in which I collected a whole two frames before the clouds rolled in but then relying on auto-focusing on the second night forgetting that the pixel scale and other attributes were different from those expected by the calibrated auto-focus profile, Doh! This resulted in three hours of slightly out of focus subs from the one shot colour camera in use - grrrrrr

Not wishing to waste the session, I stacked the two data sets separately, extracted a dummy Luminance channel from the in focus data, used the out of focus data as my RGB channels and produced a not too shabby LRGB image!

Now, if only I could find a solution to my favourite '2 hours of cloud images' failure when I haven't received the email telling me that the guide star has been lost ........

Sent from my iPhone from somewhere dark .....

Good thinking. I very rarely throw away bad data. It has to be really bad to be totally useless. There are any number of ways of using it at least on some part of the final image. Maybe this should become a thread of its own.

Olly

[Ishan Mair]

And how on earth was I thinking that only my mount is revolting?

[glowingturnip]

You know what is coming next? A nice image of nothing. The wispy bit was there but the DSO was on the other side of it. The image was inverted so missed NGC 7822 entirely. So a nice image of a bit of nebulosity and nothing! 3 hours of nothing...

yep, I too have had off-target fails, like this one - http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/246002-first-light-fail/

I'm trying to spend a lot more time making sure that I'm on target, matching star positions etc to a picture of the target, before kicking off

[StargeezerTim]

yep, I too have had off-target fails, like this one - http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/246002-first-light-fail/

I'm trying to spend a lot more time making sure that I'm on target, matching star positions etc to a picture of the target, before kicking off

Actually Stuart, I think the problem is that these DSO's especially M51 and NGC 7822, are rather unstable and tend to move around a lot, making it difficult to pin them down! 

[MattJenko]

Another thing to consider is that as you get more experienced, you take on more and more challenging objects, so the chance for mess ups doesn't decrease as quickly as one might imagine.

[Tommohawk]

Gotta remember everyone posts their successes, not their failures! If we posted everything SGL would probably need a new server!

Just last night I couldn't understand why, in the middle of imaging the eclipse, I suddenly needed a much much longer exposure. Reason was that having just had a mid-session refocus, I'd left the Bahtinov mask on!

Oh how I laughed!!  Have fun!

[seo]

Oh yes they do...!  Quite a few times.

[Astrosurf]

Good thinking. I very rarely throw away bad data. It has to be really bad to be totally useless. There are any number of ways of using it at least on some part of the final image. Maybe this should become a thread of its own.

Olly

Please start one, Olly! How you can change a set to Luminance and the bad ones to RGB etc I've got an idea but it would help others.

Please let me know if you start it!

[tomato]

I took up this hobby again about 12 months ago and to date have not captured a single image worthy of the fortune I've spent on the equipment.

Before that I practiced AP in the bad old days before CCDs and auto guiding. Imagine imaging all night then spending an evening processing your film only to find the gremlins or inept operation had killed every exposure. At least we now get near instant feedback to feed our frustration!

What makes this hobby so brilliant for me is that there IS so much to get right. If we only wanted to look at stunning images, there is the Hubble top 100.

And the night sky challenge is always there, even if it is obscured by clouds, LP or moonlight most of the time.

[Feral Rabbit]

Far, far away from being competent let alone experienced but I have found the more you add into your equipment/software equation the more likely something will go wrong. Perhaps it's just my incompetence/inexperience