If it's not one thing it's another....

Set off ACP on the Pelican last night again with guiding reconfigured. Guiding was fine but focusmax/pdf failed to initialise properly so I have 2.5 hours of nicely out of focus, perfectly guided and framed Pelican!!! Grrr

Also, the out of focus stars are really oval - definite astigmatism somewhere - I suspect the AO unit myself and have a parfocal adaptor being made to replace the complete AO unit keeping the f ratio the same. That should be here by the end of next week.... Patience...patience.....PATIENCE!!!

Sky Quality Monitor

I now have the Sky Quality Monitor installed.

This little unit basically monitors the darkness of the sky. It measures it in Magnitudes per square arcsecond (MPSAS) and you can convert this to a theoretical Naked Eye Limiting Magnitude (NELM). The data is sent via a network connection to the PC and software it set-up to tek a reading every 5 minutes when it's dark.

The results are interesting - you can see the influence of the moon and cloud cover. Here's last night's data.....

Pelican - very very nearly nailed it...

I wasn't even going to set up the gear last night but the forecast and skies looked to be clearing so I set up ACP for 4 hours on the Pelican with a start time of 2330BST and went to bed.... 3.5 hours of data were good before dawn. NELM went to 5.7 so it obviously was clear and it was clear this morning when I got up. Run finshed, mount parked.
So this is 10 x 15mins Ha, binned 2 x 2. 16"LX200R @ f6.3 (2540mm)/ML3200ME/Astrodon 6nM Guided with Lodestar/FS102 at 820mm.
I have a guiding issue to sort still - there is clearly something not tracking right as the stars were oval (and consistant across the image). I have had to use a bit of 'after processing' to tidy up the stars and unfortunately it's left artifacts around them.Still - it's the first time I've done this subject with big-eye and it's great to get 'up close'!

Pelican - well nearly....

My initial reaction was - oh rats the guiding is all to pot again.
But - in defence of the system there is a lot of high cloud about and I think it just failed to reliably track the guide star - even through the FS102.
The SQM shows peak NELM at only 5.8 last night so this would seem to endorse that together with visual cloud as I went to bed and light high cloud still about this morning.
Soooo - this is the best I could get - 5 x 15min Ha binned 2 x 2. Sorry about the star trails......nice scale though!

Observatory Cooling

Well, I thought, the commercial observatories at the top of mountians do it so what can't I?

I have placed a portable air conditioner in the observatory today ( from http:www.dry-it-out.com). It is having a noticable effect in keeping the optics cool and should speed-up the temperature stabilisation of the telescope as the evening approaches....

All night for 15 minutes.....

Well I adjusted parameters, double checked settings and tried a repeat run of last night with it.
Same old problems - focus fine but failing to find a guide star. Got one usable frame of O111 on M27.
That's it then - the guiding goes back onto the FS102 and the AO get's blanked off.... I know it's all development but it's darn frustrating too at times!!!

Still - the extra 15 mins of O111 has actually smoothed the image nicely so all is not lost....

Two steps forward.....

Having utilised the Acquire Star function in FocusMax I now have basically got the focusing sorted at last. ACP was set to do periodic focus updates every 30 mins and did so without fault. Excellent.Managed a complete run last night on M13 and M27 and, apart from 3 x M27 frames, the lot was scrap because it failed to lock onto a guide star. So I have 2 and a half hours of perfectly focussed trailing stars!!!I'm not too bothered tbh as getting the focus sorted was No1 priority. Attached the 3 good frames 15min Ha 30mins O3 combined as Ha/O3/O3 Binned 2 x 2. Quite nice methinks.....