Leigh & Mark
Mark & Leigh arrived: 8:15 pm
Clear sky. (full moon)
Temp: 11C
Mark and I drove up to the AOMO with a plan to get the guide scope and camera operational. We had been having problems with the Meade DSI camera the last time we had attempted to guide. I had taken it home with me last time we were at the AOMO so that I could test it and try to find an insight into our difficulties.
I hooked it up to my laptop and home and mounted it on my Vixen 90mm telescope in my basement with it pointed to the trees across the street. As soon as I opened the software I could tell I had an image. I tinkered with the camera with several programs and found it worked with every one. I now knew that the camera itself worked and the problem had to be with the PC at AOMO or the cables between the devices.
Mark and I started to fix the problem by mounting the camera on the ED80 and hooking it up to my laptop once again. We were then able to aim at a bright star and obtain focus. We then disconnected the camera from my laptop and connected it to the PC. We were not able to get a picture with any of the software on the PC.
Mark suggested we check out which version of drivers we had mounted in the PC. He had researched ahead of time and determined what version was most suitable for our setup. We found we had drivers mounted for Windows7 64 bit which explained a lot. We ended up having to remove the Meade software that we had on the PC and re-loading software that Mark had brought from home. When we fired up the software we got an image. Yahooo!
We then started up Maxim and after a couple of attempts and a computer reboot we were able to image with the DSI as well.
Next we mounted the SBig camera onto the LX200 and did some test images with it. We had to shift to a dimmer star in Leo. The camera worked fine and after a couple of tries we got the right spacer (or lack of) in order to obtain focus.
Now we attempted to image with the SBig and guide with the DSI using Maxim. We were successful on our first attempt. We took a 5 min image of a random selection of stars in Leo. Without doing any fine tuning the guiding went very well. Our stars were round. We had not done a great job of focus and the seeing quality was poor so I wouldn’t say we got great images, however we could tell the tracking was working.
Our second target of the night proved more difficult. We shifted to a galaxy (M95) to try a deep space exposure. We had difficulty getting the Maxim software to pick a star instead of a hot pixel to guide on. We knew there was probably and easy fix for this, however we were running out of time and wanted to try guiding with PHD before we had to quit for the night.
We discovered we did not have PHD on the PC. Luckily I had a backup copy on my laptop so we were able to load a copy onto the PC. After a few attempts we were able to get everything up and running again. We were able to get the telescope to guide with the PHD while imaging M13. Again we had not paid much attention to focus and the seeing was getting worse so we won’t be publishing any new images as of yet, however we could tell we were on the right track with guiding. With more time and tinkering I think we should start seeing some results.
We ran out of time as being Sunday night I had to get some sleep before work on Monday. For some reason my boss expects me to stay awake while he is paying me. I find it also helps when you are operating machinery. So Mark and I had to pack up but at least this night we felt we had made some great progress with the guide scope and camera. We look forward to working more with this set up if the weather will co-operate.
Depart: Mark & Leigh 12:00am
Temp: 8C
