Imaging Session – 15th Dec 2021
First clear night in a few weeks – very damp, bright moon and not particularly good seeing, but I set a couple of rigs up and gave it a go. Not the best session I’ve had, but every day’s a learning day….
Setup 1: Esprit 120/ZWO ASI 533 on the SW EQ6R looking at … never actually got to that bit
- Polar Aligned using QHY Polemaster
- Set up the target plan in Sequence Generator Pro.
- Ran Auto Focus – 73751 at HFR 1.7
- Slew to target, then plate sove to exact position
- Started PHD2 – initially fine then the RA decided to go on a walkabout!
Spent the rest of the evening adjusting setting and tweaking wires etc. Still not sure what the issue is – so far, from trawling the forums it could be:
- No dark map
- Imaging near zenith can be problematic
- Damaged cable (just ordered a new one)
- Out of date ASCOM drivers, but all seem to be okay
… and as it was all working perfectly a few weeks ago I’m going with either the seeing, a hot pixel or bad cable.
Setup 2: WO Z61/ZWO ASI 183 on the IOptron CEM25P looking at NGC 6992 Veil Nebula
- Polar Aligned using ASIAir
- Autofocus – 3377
- Select target – NGC 6992 Veil Nebula
- Slew, platesolve, check framing and set run of 100 x 120sec
- !!! forgot to turn on dew heaters!!
…so out of around 2 hrs of imaging I managed to salvage just under an hour before the lens looked like it had been in a sauna!
This was the result of 21 light frames of 2 mins – total of 42mins
The same night that you were imaging NGC6992, I was doing the same. I agree, conditions were challenging – very damp with a bright Moon and I suspect there was some thin cloud around too.
Interesting to read that your RA guiding went awry. In that respect I had better luck, but I did notice that it was not as good as normal, with frequent large-ish RA excursions. I suspect this was caused either by poor atmospheric conditions or by the counterweight down position of the mount. To explain, I set up with a slight imbalance in RA, so that the gears are always biased the same direction. But as the counterweight passes through bottom dead centre, I think the bias becomes zero, before reversing.
Quite a coincidence that we both saw guiding problems in RA, on the same night and the same target.
Thanks for the comments, just need to wait for some clear skies now to test out the theories!