It's been a while since I posted. Increased age related sensitivity to winter temps and a bit of laziness around imaging galaxies during galaxy season is partly to blame. I'll do better next fall and winter. Also my aging Acer laptop while usable needs a new keyboard which, according to a local tech guy cannot be replaced. As a stop gap I acquired a $10 Bluetooth keyboard while shopping for a new computer. Also, the Acer is incompatible with Windows 11.
After some research I opted for a Dell Inspiron 2 in 1 driven by an AMD Ryzen 7 8840Hs at 3.30 Ghz. It shows when in the time it takes to stack lunar images which is an order magnitude faster than the Acer it replaces. For the most part I'm no fan of Windows 11's look and feel or Microsoft's pushing and nudging users towards the Edge browser or obnoxious OneDrive. OneDrive almost caused the loss of my years of SharpCap images. Fortunately there are numerous tipsters providing advice on how to make Win11 less annoying.
So why the Phew!? When it came time to install the auto-guider software I realized I didn't have the drivers for the Orion Autoguider. As you're likely aware Orion went out of business and PhD2 does not include the drivers. Well, much thanks to someone going by italic posting on Cloudynights the drivers and installation software can be downloaded from here on archive.org.
Over the last couple of nights I revisited some of my favorite targets, globular clusters, to give the Orion Autoguider a workout. With the current settings performance has been excellent.
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| Messier 13 (Hercules Cluster) |
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| Messier 3 |
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| Messier 5 |
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| Messier 10 |
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| Messier 12 |
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| Messier 53 |
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