Thursday, October 11, 2018

Auto Guider night three

Forecast for tonight was increasing clouds but there was a clear window of opportunity between sunset and 9 PM. I decided to take another practice shot at M22. I set up the 8" SCT AVX on the patio the same as last night, i.e. single star alignment on Saturn. Like last night there was plenty of drift, mostly in declination. 

My first attempts to calibrate on a star near Saturn started giving the 'star did not move enough' error like last night. Goof one: I forgot to plug in the mount guiding cable. Even with the cable plugged in and checking the settings the auto guider  kept failing to calibrate.

A quick Google search on the error turned up  an old  Stargazers Lounge posting suggesting I increase the 'step size' from 500 to 1500. That worked. It took about 5 minutes to complete calibration at which point I acquired the following M22 image stacking 16 x 15sec exposures.  Of course the goal is exposures in the minutes range with filters. 


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