Ever have one of those nights?

[JimB1]

Last night was just beyond frustrating. Got setup while it was daylight everything looked good… right up until the sun went down.

Off the bat my neighbor who had Diwali lights still up, but hadn’t used the ones in the backyard since Diwali ended a week ago, decided last night was the right time to turn them on all night. Not a big deal because the moon was super bright and I was aiming for Jupiter tonight which was also super bright so a little more ground light would probably be ok… just annoying.
 

Ran into my usual issue in that I can’t see Polaris well, that section of sky and most to the north/north east are washed out by NYC andNewark Airport. Usually I can get reasonably close by compass… usually…. I think I was actually pretty close but when I did a star align the LX85 got nowhere near Vega, which I could clearly see. When through the autostar settings, reset the mount and tried again, same thing, way off. Shut everything down, verified everything on the mount was level and polar aligned as I could and tried again. It got closer, ast least Vega was just outside the view in the Finder so I centered it and went to the next star, Koceb which is in the Big Dipper but puts it in the washed out area but I could just make it out. Again, it slewed to an area not near Koceb but I decided to just manually get it there with the hand box so I could move on with life. 
 

So put in my target for the night of Jupiter, again it got in the general vicinity but was outside the area of the finder scope so I have to slew around a bit to get it in sight. Ok, finally there right? Views looked good. Jupiter was clear, a good view of the moons, this is going to work nice… famous last words. Swapped the eyepiece for the camera and… nothing. No views through the eyepiece. Fire capture threw an error about the moonlite focuser and crashed. It not only crashed fire capture but froze up the laptop. Reboot time… 

laptop came back up, opened fire capture again. Same thing moonlite driver issue, crash, reboot. Did this one more time and gave up on fire capture. It did none of this indoors earlier. Now the temps were starting to drop and the wind is picking up. 
 

I decide to fall back to skycapture  and the manual moonlite focuser control.  Opened skycapture connected the camera, no errors, but also no image. When though reconnect a few times It said it was connected but no image.  Was outside for a couple of hours now, last ditch effort, pint at the moon, super bright and huge last night. Go to put me nowhere near it…. Again, but easy to find in the sky. Got a big white blur on the camera, ok so something is working, can’t get it in focus though. Arrggghh neighbors 10000 watt halogen backyard light turns on. Between that, the moon, the Diwali lights, my yard is like full daylight. 
 

Nope, I’m done. 
 

Broke everything down and put it all away for the night. Then to top it off, when I went to close the tripod, last piece to put way, one off the little rubber feet came off, no big deal, they come off all the time, usually they just pop back on.. usually. Nope, the spike that it fits onto is inside the foot. It had broken off. I don’t see a bolt or anything. I have no idea how the spike attaches to the tripod so I couldn’t put it back on. 
 

Then I got up this morning to catch the end of the lunar eclipse, it’s low and behind trees in my neighborhood so that was a washout too. 
Like the Albert King song “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”

-Jim
 

[PeterCPC]

We all get nights like that sometime. I would say that you don't need to Polar Align if you are going after Jupiter. Just a single star or solar align would do fine. Try Sharpcap, if prefer it to Firecapture.