First night out in a while with some new toys and M101

[JSeaman]

My first ever ‘report’ but it’s nice to share so here goes .. clear skies had been forecast for a while and boy was it about time. On the shelf for the last few weeks has been a lakeside astro focuser which I have been keen to try out and a field flattener for my ED80. I ordered all the adaptors to get from the ED80 to QHY8L with the right threads/spacers etc. and everything arrived… except my T2 (QHY fitting) to M42 (field flattener), blast. There’s a time and place for getting everything right and there’s a time and place for lining stuff up by eye and insulating taping the living heck out of it (this was the latter).
 
I got out at 9pm and discovered lots of clouds. Blast again. I thought I’d get cracking anyway because there was a lot to go wrong and I figured it would be a night without images but just setting things up for another night. Once I attached my bodged taped up QHY8L to the rest of the rig I realised that my scope balance was going to be miles out. Impressively it would happily spin from any angle and land perpendicular to the ground. A few minutes later I had adjusted the dovetail and moved the scope rings until everything was just right. I expected my polar alignment to be a mess because the pier/scope had been unloved for a while but everything looked good to what polarfinder was saying so I carried on.
 
The stars were drifting quite wildly when I first powered up (not sure why, the EQ6 must have been doing something funky) but as soon as I started the 2 star alignment process they settled down. The challenge of having the computer inside is achieving focus when you use a CCD. I managed to get my guide scope (QHY5L-IIC) sorted last night by tweaking it and going inside then tweaking again etc. I’m very pleased I got pin sharp stars at the end of it. I kicked off PHD and had <1 degree of movement on RA and DEC so very good guiding for my set up.
 

I used the electronic focuser for the first time and it is a huge improvement over what I could do by eye. I thought I was pretty reasonable at achieving focus but now I realise how inadequate it was, just the fact that you don’t wobble the scope was a big factor but the incredible level of control you have with the lakeside unit was astonishing. I managed to get the FWHM value to 9/10 which is better than I have ever managed by hand, especially with questionable skies.
 
So there I sat in my nice warm living room with PHD telling me it was guiding well (in focus), adjusting my imaging scope focus at the click of a button with Nebulosity happily chilling my QHY8L to -20 degrees. What a success, things could have gone a lot worse.
 
I decided to aim up for M101 because it’s a nice easy target and would be visible for a few hours. The synscan did the leg work for me (I’m really warming to this over star hopping) and it appeared just below the centre of the screen in my test shot. Not bad considering I was using the finder scope to do the 2 star alignment. I fired off a 5 minute sub and … a dust bunny! There’s a big splodge somewhere in the optical chain, thankfully far enough out of the way that I could deal with it later in post processing.
 
At this point, whilst the seeing wasn’t brilliant, the sky was clear and everything was behaving. I figured I might as well let it run and take 10 minute subs until 3am just to see what I could get. I told my Echo Dot to switch things off for me at 3am and wrapped up for the evening.
 
5am came around and I popped down to find the QHY was <1 inch away from smashing into the pier, my estimate of “about 3am should be fine” was much (much) closer than I thought!! I popped the scope back away and checked out a few subs, a couple of aeroplanes but otherwise things looked pretty reasonable. Sadly work was calling so other than a quick play in Pixinsight I headed off for the day.
 
My few hours of M101 is not going to win any prizes I’m happy with it.
 
After so many frustrations for such a long time I now finally find myself with some very good kit which is working very well. And it’s in no small part to the advice I got in here about running some Cat6 cable to a powered USB box, that has utterly transformed the reliability of my rig. No more trailing 30M USB cables out a window and hoping they happen to talk to the various bits and bobs, all that hassle is gone. So, for a rare change, things are running well, hope you’re all enjoying it too
 
 
 

[domstar]

A joy to read. Thanks and congratulations.