Secret Still Observatory

'Star, star teach me how to shine, shine'

Mark

4 minute read

    Integration time:
    * SII 75 x 300s (375m)
    * Ha 86 x 300s (430m)
    * OIII 53 x 300s (265m)
    * Total: 1070m/17h50m

    Integration time target
    * Target: 20 hours
    * Progress: 89%

Notes

28th April 2023 I recently acquired a more capable processing PC which has opened the door to re-processing of lots of old data which was languishing untouched due to the unreasonable length of time required for the old PC to run Pixinsight. Nine months after the initial acquisition, the…

Mark

8 minute read

9th October 2022 After lots of tweaking and testing on Windows 10 and 11, the issues with the focusser finally seem to be resolved. I wish I could say definitively why the focussers hadn’t worked on either of the rigs but the common factor in the solution in both cases was new, high-quality micro USB to USB A cables and connecting to USB 3.0 ports rather then USB 2 ports. The takeaway from this is not to swap equipment between set-ups in Windows for fear of upsetting the flaky and…

Mark

2 minute read

9th July 2022 I recalibrated PHD2 on the EQ6R-Pro last night which worked fine. I then successfully guided to an acceptable standard. Unfortunately high cloud affected to whole evening’s imaging so only a few poor subs were captured across both the scopes. At the moment I am putting recent guiding woes down to poor transparency. To be monitored however and I will run PPEC at some point to see if guiding is improved further.

Mark

1 minute read

2nd July 2022 I ran the 200PDS on the Cave Nebula in narrowband and the Askar on the Cygnius Loop in OSC. Amazingly my tweaks to the AZ-GTI mount seem to have made the guiding work and although the guiding standard deviation was horrible the result was very tight round stars on the Askar. The guiding on the Newtonian was awful too and I think that the extreme humidity was affecting the seeing quite badly.

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