M13 Hercules

[JSeaman]

I have been working on this over 2 nights to prove out a couple of things. I have a coma corrector now but my spacing is obviously wrong, a 10mm spacer is on order to address this. I have managed to get Ekos working but with a few gotchas:

1. The auto focus routine, when checked with a Bahtinov, was not achieving good focus so I am doing this manually for now
2. The mount didn't keep a log last night and didn't park again, no idea why
3. The auto focus routine sometimes gets into a loop where it says it isn't doing anything but it actually is, very hard to fight it too, I ended up shutting down the Indi server to recover it

On the plus side though:

1. Local plate solving and correction is amazing, this alone makes Ekos/KStars worthwhile for me
2. The guiding is so much quicker to set up than PHD2, I have spent months tweaking settings to make this scope get somewhere near acceptable and Ekos just works (within seconds)
3. I took a picture for the first time in ages!

I don't think this would be considered a good M13 but it is progress at least

Best 98% of 97 red, 113 green, 113 blue, 49x5 second luminance and 46x30 second luminance
15 bias, 20 darks, 50 flats for each filter
 

 

 

Edited July 16, 2021 by JSeaman

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Lovely image!

[alacant]

2 hours ago, JSeaman said:

didn't keep a log last night and didn't park again, no idea why

Hi

Lovely shot. Nice to see it fill the frame. The cc just needs to be an extra mm or so further from the sensor.

Don't forget to choose verbose logs for both indi and the mount and to write the results to a file.

Until you get a log, perhaps best to simply have the mount park at a given time at the end of your session.

HTH

 

[JSeaman]

Thanks - Would you believe it, it is actually 11mm out from the 55mm spacing! I had double counted the ASI1600 black spacer in my calcs

I had verbose logs on but something went wrong because it was just an empty file. I'm going to tell it to do a scheduled park tonight and watch what it does this time. I'm wondering if running a picture schedule before the overall schedule is causing it

[alacant]

 

21 minutes ago, JSeaman said:

empty file

Make sure you have w on:

~/.local/share/kstars/logs
 

[JSeaman]

Sorry not sure what you mean by w on?

[alacant]

w: write

Allow the folder where the log is found to be written to.

What's the permission on that folder?

 

[JSeaman]

Ah right, the file was created but was empty. It had worked all previous sessions and no permissions changed so just a glitch I guess