A night of firsts! :D

[samtheeagle]

Well last night was a night of firsts for me, and it was all mostly accidental! I spent my first full night out under the stars, the catalyst of it all was my first ever autoguiding session!!!

Let me set the scene... It was approaching midnight when inspiration suddenly hit as to why the circuit I was building for my home brew autoguiding hardware wasn't working. I'd spent a couple of weeks wrestling with it and was at the point of giving up and buying a shoestring device. So I fired up the soldering iron and a few minutes later I was in business! I grabbed my scope, all the other stuff I have been collecting for my modest autoguiding set up, and headed out to the garden. As this was just a trial run I wasn't worried about finding any particular target, I just wanted to point it at stars and take some nice long exposures!

The first test was to see whether the 50mm finder scope I picked up, along with an LX modified Toucam would be able to detect a guide star... At first there were some issues, GuideDog just fell over when I tried to connect the camera and PHD wouldn't use the LX feature - GAH! As it turns out, the combo was more than capable of picking up guide stars even without LX, so that was the first hurdle over...

So then the moment of truth... I hook up the autoguiding hardware to the modded handset of the mount, selected a star and told PHD to guide away. The motors start burbling, and the LED flickers from green to red, it's all looking good. After a short calibration effort it locks on and declares itself as guiding! OMFG! How happy am I right now? I start snapping away...

I'm pretty happy with that! That's a 305.5 second exposure, black level adjusted. The stars look pretty round to me. I'm sure there are a great many things I can tweak to improve the guiding, but for a seat of your pants first live test I'm over the moon. The satisfaction of making my own hardware, and writing the driver software for it too is brilliant... It had me pulling my hair out for a while there, but now that it's working I'm chuffed I plan to do a bit of a write up on my little project, so if you're interested keep 'em peeled...

Then to wrap up my night of firsts, just as I'm about to pack it in I notice a very bright "star" low in the sky. Hmm, I wonder if that's Jupiter? Hell yeah it is! I have to monkey around for a few minutes to raise the telescope up on the tripod to get a line of sight over the garden fence, and then the wow factor. To be fair the view was awful, looking through so much atmosphere was like being underwater, but I did manage to make out some cloud banding.

All in all it was an awesome night, but boy am I hanging today Might get my head back down in a bit.

[Beyond_Vision]

It certainly seems to be doing the business. A great first trial.

Regards

Kevin

[Psychobilly]

Congrats on getting the homebrew interface up and running

Theres no looking back now that your guiding the whole universe awaits...

Peter...

[beamish]

XLNT news

Look fwd to seeing some stuff in the nxt day or so

Karlo

[samtheeagle]

Heh heh, thanks Karlo I was out again last night despite severe sleep deprivation from the night before... Didn't really have a lot of luck though. First it took me FOREVER to simply locate my target, M13. Then it was really quite blustery in my neck of the woods, which was doing me no favours. And then to cap it all off I made the rookie mistake of not recharging my camera's battery. It gave up the ghost at about 1am after only 4 images. So not really a lot more to show yet, I've got maybe one or two more usable subs that I might merge in with the ones I already have, see if they add much to the stack...?

[beamish]

Nah, don't worry there'll be plenty more occasions. I was up till sunrise but didn't get going while after midnight, trying to sort a few niggles (aren't there always ? )

Saw Jupiter though !!!

Good luck with it all and well done on sorting out your s/ware.

Karlo

[samtheeagle]

Yeah, early days yet. I need fair few more night practice me thinks

Here's an image of my rather modest set up:

And my new little box of joy:

I'm pretty happy with it all, it certainly does the business. It's me and my lack of skill that's the weak link! :S

And I've got PHD to control the LX webcam, which is nice For some reason it only offers up to COM4... My usb -> serial cable had entrenched itself as COM6. Still all sorted now, just need another clear night that doesn't have a work day following it

Getting a glimpse of Jupiter is nice treat for staying up until stupid o'clock eh?