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…

    Integration time:
    * 291 x 120s (9h42m)

Notes

16th September 2022 Whilst monitoring the observatory imaging this evening I had the chance to process the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula from last month. Processed as SHO from an OSC image.

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.

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.