1st Light Esprit 100 ED NGC6960

[Dinglem]

I recieved my new toy on Friday but didn't get time to set it up till Saturday, to my surprise it remained clear, so went to try it out. Everything went so well I polar aligned in no time using Sharpcap. I slewed over to Alkaid and focussing with the Bhatinov mask was a doddle with the very smooth 3" focusser. I use APT and CDC/Ascom to control everything from a laptop next to my mount, I used Goto++ & PlateSolving to move to my target NGC6960 (The Witch's Broom Nebula).  PHD2 quickly calibrated and appeared to be guiding very well. I then set APT off capturing 300s subs with a dither after each one. I thought to myself if this is how it's going to be everytime with my new scope this pastime is going to be so easy from now on. I retired inside RDC'd from my other laptop to keep an eye on the progress and relaxed. After about an hour APT started it's automatic Meridian Flip process, that's when everything went pear-shaped, it failed to platesolve it's image and timed out, so I tried forcing it to flip and it just would not platesolve the 30s image it took. I then did a Goto++ on my target, the mount did a flip took the image and platesolved it first time then happily started taking 300s images again. It got to about 01.00 and I was getting tired so I stopped it capturing thinking I'd better go to bed, but then I noticed Cassiopeia had appeared from behind my house which meant M32 would be in view and I wondered what it would look like captured through the Esprit. I slewed round and looked at the sub then did the stupid thing of rotating the focusser to try to get it across the corners of the sensor to capture as much as possible, I took 4 subs, then a few darks and packed everything away. It wasn't until the next day when I took some Bias and Flat frames and tried to process it all that I realised by moving everything I had ruined the flats. We live and learn. Anyway I managed to just stack the 12 lights from before the flip and cropped it with no further processing until I get some more subs. I'm very please with my new scope.