Hardware and software advice needed for upgrading to guided imaging

[ianpwilliams]

I was thinking more along the lines of a large pack to dry the shed out.

You can get ones that change colour when they are full, you pop the, in the oven to dry them out again.

Alternately you can make your own, either using the little packs that come with most electronic things you buy or by buying some silica gel.

/Dan

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Which takes me back to the question of how to keep the tripod and mount moisture-free ready for sessions, if they are going to live in the shed.

Have you got any links to the large pack that you are talking about? I have no idea what they are.

[D4N]

Which takes me back to the question of how to keep the tripod and mount moisture-free ready for sessions, if they are going to live in the shed.

Have you got any links to the large pack that you are talking about? I have no idea what they are.

Something like this should do the trick:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/DEHUMIDIFIER-REUSABLE-MOISTURE-ABSORBER/dp/B00AZZB5UY/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1449099839&sr=8-9&keywords=desiccants

/Dan

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[ianpwilliams]

So maybe have the tripod stood up, and the mount on it's side resting on a chair with one of those bags on top of it, and then the other one on the floor somewhere? Clearly the priority would be to keep the moisture away from the mount.

[Tinker1947]

So maybe have the tripod stood up, and the mount on it's side resting on a chair with one of those bags on top of it, and then the other one on the floor somewhere? Clearly the priority would be to keep the moisture away from the mount.

Mounts and Scopes are built to withstand some moisture, my 250P-DS, ST-80, NEQ6, couple of Maplin PSU's and a Medium Tower PC they have lived in a Obby for several years which is like a shed but the roof rolls off, they have been out there for years with no other protection

[ianpwilliams]

OK sounds good.

Are these essentially the same ones? I prefer eBay to Amazon:

http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=171271771237&alt=web

And would it be a case of keeping the bags in the shed day and night, and maybe drying them out each weekend?

[D4N]

Yeh they look the same to me.

Weekly dry out should be fine, you may be able to leave it longer if the humidity is low.

I would probably just hang them off the counterweight bar or put them in the accessory tray.

/Dan

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[ianpwilliams]

OK.

I'm now thinking that I should try dithering next time I go out, because darks take far too much time up.

This thread here:

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/235351-dithering-for-dummies/

says:

"Launch PHD guiding, go Tools, Enable server and then launch APT and under the Gear tab shift click Guide and choose PHD as guiding program, set the parameters and you are done. APT will automatically connect to PhD in server mode and issue Dither commands once capture ends. You can monitor the axis being moved by looking at the PHD guiding graph."

Is that all there is to it? What parameters do you need to set? Do you do this before you start guiding? I believe I would need to purchase the full version of APT to do this, which I was planning on doing anyway.

[Thalestris24]

Hi Ian

The free APT will still control dithering with the PHD2 server mode setting ticked. But, tbh, you just want to get up and running first and get used to your imaging workflow and guiding. Once everything is running ok, you can easily set APT to dither at any time. See for example this. You know, a lot of your questions can be answered if you do a search on here (or use google to search on here)!

Louise

[ianpwilliams]

Thanks for the link. I do Google search sometimes, but I often end up reading through multiple threads and getting confused. But yes, for now I'll just try to get to the guiding stage and see if I can get some guided subs. I'm not sure if I'll bother with darks because various sources say you need a large amount of them to make it worthwhile and it'll be time consuming enough setting everything up and hopefully getting g decent length subs, and flats too.

[cjdawson]

Don't forget that you don't need the camera attached to the scope to take the darks. Nothing stopping you from locking the camera in somewhere that's the same temperature at where you were imaging, then letting it take the darks, whilst you head off and get some sleep.  They'll be ready for you when you wake up rested.

[ianpwilliams]

Maybe I could leave the camera in the shed overnight taking the darks with the lens cap on (assuming I've got a cap which goes over the camera-scope adaptors). Although I'd have to use the camera remote timer, and hope that neither the camera battery nor the timer battery ran out.

[ianpwilliams]

I was looking for an enclosure box to put the Masterplug extension in and I found this:

http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=231722604398&alt=web

But unfortunately the extension seems to be bigger than the box, which I suppose is intended for normal extensions rather than reel type. But I suppose any old plastic box with a lid would do, resting the lid on the cables?

[D4N]

Yeh that's what I do, it's not like are going to be out there in a downpour.

/Dan

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[ianpwilliams]

True, although I had a panicky rain shower moment during one unguided session. I really should buy a plastic sheet in case that happens again.

Looking at the RCD (hoping to buy on the high street now rather than online), it looks like 30A is the trip point, and 13A fused:

http://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-RCD-Socket-Adaptor/p/710299

I take it that this would work fine with the 20m Masterplug reel extension with the mount and laptop plugged in?

[ianpwilliams]

How long is our session?

It would be simple enough to test if you have the adaptor to power the laptop from 12V.

Another way to do it would be to work out how much power it actually uses when it is running.

I have a device that goes into the socket and records power consumption.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/13a-plug-in-energy-saving-monitor-n67fu

You can just measure the current on the cable but this could easily be a long way out depending on when the charger kicks in.

/Dan

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I haven't entirely given up on the battery option yet, maybe a separate 22Ah Tracer battery to power the laptop, and then hopefully the laptop battery would kick in when the Tracer ran out.

If I bought an adaptor to connect the Tracer to the laptop then I suppose I could just leave it running with all the programs running, low brightness etc, and see when it ran out, although I wouldn't be in the room when it died or switched to the laptop battery, so that probably wouldn't help me.

The other option is the Maplin thing that you linked to. That reminded me of when npower sent me a homer energy monitor (photo attached), which I've never used, but which I wonder if I could use? It actually wraps around the live cable that runs into the electricity meter, so I guess I would have make a note of the current level, and then set everything up indoors, have all the programs running, with a dim screen etc, and compare the values before and after. Although I would have to make sure that I ran the mount from the Tracer and not the mains. I also wondered if it would be possible to wrap the monitor sensor around the laptop power cable rather than the meter cable?

[ianpwilliams]

I've bought an energy monitor similar to the Maplin one. The monitor is telling me that the laptop is drawing around 0.1 amps when idle and when using the power mode which I use for astronomy (I have the same settings for battery and mains power), and around 0.15 amps if I switch the power mode to maximum performance for comparison. Does that sound about right?

I guess the next step would be to connect the laptop to the mount, have EQMOD, Stellarium, StellariumScope and APT all running, and see what amps are drawn then? And would that give me an accurate reading given that I would be buying a cigar to round plug adaptor to connect a second Tracer battery to the laptop (assuming I decide that it could do the job)?

I'd also have to consider how the power would work. If the Tracer was powering the laptop via a cigar to round plug adaptor, I guess the laptop would think it was being powered by mains, and therefore if the Tracer battery ran out then the laptop would automatically switch to the laptop battery, giving me an extra couple of hours.

[D4N]

Remember if you test the mains side of the transformer the current will be different to the low voltage side.

However you can work out the power consumption to see what it would draw from a 12V battery.

P=IxV

P=0.15x240

P=32W

I=P/V

I=32/12

I=2.7A

And at low power setting;

P=IxV

P=0.1x240

P=24W

I=P/V

I=24/12

I=2A

/Dan

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[ianpwilliams]

What does 0.15 and 0.1 represent in your examples?

I've tested the laptop while connected to the mount (still running from the mains), and these are the results:

StellariumScope - 0.1A

plus EQMOD - 0.13A

plus Stellarium - 0.2A

plus APT - 0.2A

plus PHD2 - 0.2A

So it's clear to see that Stellarium is the power hungry one, as was mentioned before. And 2A seems to be the draw. So what would that be when powering from a Tracer?

Ideally I'd like to keep the programs running in case I need them, although once I started a plan in APT to start taking the lights then presumably I could turn the display off which I'm sure would help (I didn't think to test with all programs running but with the display off).

[ianpwilliams]

Also, the output of the laptop PSU is 20V rather than 12V.

So with 0.2 at 20V, would that be 2.4A? 9.17 hours from a 22Ah Tracer?

[D4N]

The 0.1 and 1.5 are the current measured by your energy monitor.

The energy monitor is plugged into the mains supply so it is measuring the current at 240V mains supply. I converted this to 12V for you as your tracer battery is 12V.

The power consumption of the laptop will stay the same but as you reduce the voltage the current has to increase to compensate for is.

Your battery can only supply 12V, this will be increased to 20V by the car charger for the laptop but the current at that point is irrelevant.

If your mains supply is using 0.2A at 240V your tracer battery will have to use 4A at 12V to provide the same amount of power.

I would suggest CDC as a battery friendly alternative to Stellarium.

You can also close it down once you have the scope pointed the right way.

/Dan

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[ianpwilliams]

I'll give CDC a look. At the moment I run StellariumScope, click Connect which opens EQMOD, start Stellarium from within StellariumScope, and then open APT and PHD2. If I were to use CDC how would that work in conjunction with the other programs?

[D4N]

I connect CdC to the mount using the ascom driver, you should be able to do the same.

If you want other programs to control the mount at the same time as CdC then you can use an Ascom hub like POTH.

I generally don't bother with the hub, I open CdC and connect to the mount, slew to target (don't bother aligning), disconnect and close CdC, open Astro tortilla, connect to mount, capture, solve, sync, re-slew, shut down astrotortilla.

That will be me on target and I will only run PHD2 and the capture software from then on.

If I decide to change target I just repeat the process.

/Dan

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[ianpwilliams]

So I would run CDC, connect to mount, slew to the target (although I would probably 3-star align first), close CDC, and then run PHD2 and start guiding, and run APT and start imaging. That actually sounds more straightforward seeing as Stellarium also requires StellariumScope.

Regarding AstroTortilla, and capture/solve/Sync, what does all that actually do? Because at this point AstroTortilla isn't part of my setup.

[D4N]

Astrotortilla looks at an image you capture and works out where in the sky you are really pointing at. It then tells your mount this information and directs it to re-slew to where it should have been pointing. A second image can then be taken to confirm it is now pointing the right way and make further adjustments if necessary.

With my setup I take a 1 second luminance exposure with 4x4 binning, this gives plenty of stars for the software to work its magic on.

It takes the software between 10 seconds and a minute to solve the image, this will be faster on a modern computer, my o say laptop is really old!

The beauty of it is that it renders star alignmnet unnecessary, so long as you are polar aligned the software will do the rest.

When you are imaging things that are quite a tight fit on your sensor or you want to mosaic it becomes a bit of a must have otherwise you will end up wasting a lot of time taking images where bits of your target are missing.

I thought the latest version of Stellarium is able to connect with Ascom drivers? I could be wrong though as I don't use it.

/Dan

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[ianpwilliams]

I don't know about that when it comes to Stellarium, I was just doing what people said which was to use StellariumScope, but I may end up switching to CDC anyway.

I better have a look at AstroTortilla tutorials then, because star aligning can be a right pain to do.