Frustrated

[furrysocks2]

So I built my south facing obsy last month to house the DIY dob... I had some pretty alright-for-a-webcam moon shots through the dob last year, getting 75fps 640x480 out of the 1/4"-sensor PS3 Eye and an intense few weeks of patience and processing.

But a lot is wrong with my setup, and I mean loads!

• No tracking for one. I point, capture while drifting, stop capture and repoint... I can get 1000, perhaps 1500 frames off per field of view, but that's an ROI typically 300x300 or so.
• My mirror is awful. It's 8.5" but full of holes and patchy bits, covered in dust/haze, so image is not great.
• I've not collimated in years... so I guess it serves me right.
• My DIY alt/az bearings both need attended to... az uses the little "H" and "C" plastic tap top caps running on laminate, just needs another rub with soap, I love it but it's getting a bit stiff. Not sure what's going on with alt... creaking a bit, but a wood-creaking noise... maybe a failed glue joint somewhere, better check.
• The 2" focusser lets me use a 2" EP, which is GREAT! but it's not easy to focus, needs some attention too - don't even ask about trying to barlow it - def need tracking for that anyway.
• My build skills are not actually that refined... it's all a bit of a bodge, or at least everything else adding up to what I see as a poorly performing scope makes me think less of it
• No IR filter, just a bare sensor. Again, oops.
• The cameras themselves, perhaps. And not just the dust bunnies. Probably pushing it some at 0.75 arc-sec/pixel, too.
• and my processing is often a little heavy handed to try to compensate for some of the above.

The "good results" I had last year are difficult to obtain... last night's images are poor in comparison. I nearly deleted the whole capture folder before bed.

Heavily cropped, 500 stack from 5000+ 75fps 640x480.

This one taken with my microscope camera, again cropped8fps@1024x768, maybe a stack of 20/200?

 

 

I think I need to pay more attention to histograms... often I end up with a very narrow range of gray. But I'll persevere... and I'm sure the equatorial platform will have it's own idiosyncrasies.

[furrysocks2]

A minor plus is that I got what I set out for, the valley between Nernst and Avicenna - not as good as I'd hoped though.