One of those Nights..

[OXO]

We all have them at some time or other but last night anything that could go wrong went wrong imaging wise:rolleyes:

List of failers..

1. Setup ED80 and EQ6 to test my now fixed Toucam SC1.5, after 30 mins of fixing the Lead again it starts working and polar alignment is out (11 secs max exposure). Re polar aligning the Red light in the EQ6 polar scope has fallen so Polaris and co and blurred out so guess worked the alignment and managed 30 secs max exposures BUT K3ccdtools decides it doesn't wanna work now :shock:.

2. Bring laptop back inside too re install K3ccdtools and take it outside again and try to run it guess what i forgot to stick the REG code in so back inside to get the code .

3.Right thinking at last iam all set to do some imaging with the Toucam trails come back and exposures are limited to 8 secs :shock:, give up on the TOUCAM and pack the Laptop and cam back inside.

4.Setup the Canon 300D and the batteries for the EQ6 have gone flat .

Give up on imaging for the night

Blessing was i managed to get some really nice observing done in dark skies (Proper first observations using the ED80 in darkness) and it was awesome inky black background with pin sharp diamond stars, observed all the available open clusters, and around 12 faint fuzzies with M27 being the best Stunning!

So all in all imaging was a complete waste of time and effort observing was fantastic and made up for the messing about with camera's.

James :D :p

[MartinB]

That would've had me tearing my hair out James. Your alignment must have been a way out to get trails after just a few secs with the ED80.

The EQ6's are very battery thirsty from what I've heard.

At least it stayed clear. The final straw would have been to get everything working fine and then cloud

[geppetto]

Bad luck James

What was up with the Toucam by the way?

[OXO]

What was up with the Toucam by the way?

The Camera's serial lead had for want of a better word fallen apart, small bolt screws had become loose whilst plugged into the laptop so when coming to pull it out the wires connecting were pulled from the houseing so i had to resolder them and get them onto the right pin's, one of which hadnt been done properly(by me) so last night i re soldered it. Also there were more dust bunnies than ive ever seen so i popped it under my mircroscope and cleaned it . Software was being temperamental..

All not lost though got some nice views in..

Here's a really bad image of M57 hehe