Hey all,
Just wanted to share my comical & frustrating night of imaging after a long break. When I thought about it this morning I just had to laugh - what a comedy of errors on my part.
It's been months since we had a clear sky without too much wind. So I took the scope out to the garden, did a 3 star alignment. Went to M82 and setup the QHY6 (nice camera, pity about the software though) to see if it would catch it - goto was out by about 2 fovs but I eventually got it pretty much in the centre of the screen and took some short sample shots to get focus - should have focused on Dubhe as that would have been faster.
Right - happy with all that. Went to attach GPUSB & B&W Toucam. Found a guide star (thank god for flip mirrors as this was a pain in that dim area). OK, all going well. Went back to m82 but halfway there tripped & pulled out the dec cable!!!!! dang, need to realign again. No problem but it adds time.
Right - bang on M82 this time. Hooked up the autoguiding and the danged thing could not get the dec calibration right for some reason - it was sticking! About 20 minutes later got it working so I made a 120 second shot through the idas filter - was going to use a h-alpha filter but decided to try this first. Horrible big blob in the centre of the view - WTF? Oh hell, some piece of dust of something from the threads must have landed slap bang in the middle of the field flattener. OK, so dissassemble, take off the filter wheel, and clean with a specgrabber.
Done! Reassemble and refocus and shoot. Excellent result. Yay! Set it up to do 1 hour of lights & played around with the Dob for visual while it was doing that - visual sucked as the sky was dark enough at 1:30 am.
Went back to check the lights at 2:30 am. NOOOOOOOOO - I spent so long fixing problems that I didn't realise that M82 was about to move behind a chimney!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :oops: :oops: Big white blobs for all but 2 light frames. What a dumb mistake.
Moral of the story is that practice makes perfect. Setup used to take me 45 minute max. Last night took about 2.5 hrs to get everything right! Also, I should have had everything prepared well before going out - especially checking for dust.
I felt like Mr Bean and probably looked like him too :lol:
  