Further ramblings on my AllSkyCamera

[Horwig]

Some time ago I built an AllSkyCamera, details here:

The truth is that I kept having problems, EZPlanetary would crash for no good reason, I tried SharpCap, but it was not much better, I played around with USB hubs and active repeaters, to no avail, it was just buggy, so it went on the back burner, the hardware stayed out, I just forgot all about it.

I'd bought an USFF Pc to run it (a Dell Optiplex 160), so that it was separate to the imaging rig, I bought the PC for a song on fleabay, intending to make it a headless station, but it came minus a hard drive and caddy, which was a pain, as the caddy had a fan, which the PC would search for before booting, which made headless use difficult.

Anyway, back to the present, deciding to have another go at it as winter approached, I made a dummy fan for the PC after a trawl on the net, basically a 555 timer giving pulses into the fan connector on the motherboard, now it boots to Windows, I've got teamviewer to launch on startup, so I can view from the house, and I've gone back to play with cables, using a 3m cable from the QHY5 ii camera to an active 3m cable, which seems to work well. After a play at using SharpCap as polar finder, I gave it another go with the ASC, and guess what, it's all stable, and has now been running unattended for a week. 

Unlike EZPlanetary, Sharpcap stores dark frames on the hard drive, not in ram, so a much better system.

Proof of the pudding, cloud, rain drops, light pollution and Milky Way, all in one frame, what more could you ask for?

North is at 5 o clock wheer the electricity pole is, camera needs a slight twist in the housing

I reckon the job's a good un, time to move on to other parts of the kit