Heart Nebula. Still testing … and it went very wrong
I got a slot of bad average cloudy sky, and I believed I could test a 2h30min of shooting with a UHC-S filter on IC1805 (Heart Nebula)
Polar alignement nicely done with the PoleMaster (I think I get it now, very simple), I wanted to automate the shooting through my mini-computer attached to the mount and camera. I took the small mask of Bathinov and made my focus. I got the three pikes perfectly aligned.
I then went in my house, piloting the mount through a Wifi Access Point I put to share dedicated network between components (I definitively didn’t want to use the 2.4GHz Wifi from the mount NYX101, the mini-computer is attached by USB to the mount directly). I made a two stars alignement that showed pretty much that my polar alignement was more than good and then launched a slew on IC1805 to get 150 shots of 1min exposure each.
I forgot about it and brought all the equipment in the house after the shooting. That’s basically what I intended to do : not spending my time at checking every single shot during the shooting. I got all shots unattended, including the 10 darks and 10 biases. What a ZWO Asiair would do for you, but not ZWO-based, open to other standard such as ASCOM or LX200 and with the ability to use other software to drive the mount. I’m experiencing some issues with catalogs integrated in software, I could mention CTB1 which is the next target if I can close the IC1805 tests, and I wanted to use whatever fits best for my requirements.
What went wrong ? Well, my focus was very nice … but I didn’t use the screw to be sure it would not slip … and because I have a camera, a filter drawer and the back focus rings attached to the focuser … Gravity probably moved my focus during the slew to target. All 150 shots with big unfocused stars … wasted shots. It happens and I can only but learn from it. Next time I’ll do better.
The only thing I got was an horrible stacked picture and I noticed that something was wrong with the stars … I started to think about sorting the lights shots, maybe some of them were impacting the stack (it was a bad sky, cloudy)… nope, all of them were crap.
I did a starless version of it, and even there, you can see three-four stars completely out of focus …
Exif : Askar FRA300 + PegasusAstro Nyx-101 + + ZWO ASI183MC Pro cooled at 0°C / Baader UHC-S filter 2”
150 lights 60s each Gain 0 / 10 biases / 10 darks / no flats
Stacked with Siril - No post-treatment except histogram automatic
