beren
31-07-2005, 02:47 PM
Like Paul i experimented with autoguiding last night using Guidedog and K3CCDtools and delving into their features , got into it so much that from 6.00pm Sat to 4.30 this morning the time just seemed to fly . I mostly wanted to freehand going through all through the settings without going into all the manuals so i didnt achieve much in the way of images but it was a lot of fun and a tad frustrating { :D }, you really do get to appreciate more fully the efforts of others in producing fine images.
Used K3ccdtools to help with drift aligning first up and i did a reset on the lx to default settings to get a PEC error readout using the drift explorer feature , after about 10 minutes there was a peak to peak RA pec error of 15arc sec. Moved on to the tricky aligning of a guide star while centring a target and then getting the Meade LPI settings right to pick up the target star , used Guidedog for this . Did some trials using the LX as the guiding scope and the Orion ED as the imager, got a lot of fine tuning to do but i was happy with some results eg: 15min one exposures of swan/Lagoon
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/DSC_0002Medium.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/DSC_0001Medium.jpg
Sky conditions were very strange last night , no clouds but the whole 360 degree horizon had a weird red tinge illumination and skyglow was bad , trying to get a decent Mars image later in the evening was next to impossible and some others like the Helix nebula arnt worth displaying :confuse2: . I really wanted to get a NGC253 image but halfway through the shot the battery for the D70 ran dry but managed to get this noise infested shot :ashamed:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/DSC_0007Small.jpg
Used K3ccdtools to help with drift aligning first up and i did a reset on the lx to default settings to get a PEC error readout using the drift explorer feature , after about 10 minutes there was a peak to peak RA pec error of 15arc sec. Moved on to the tricky aligning of a guide star while centring a target and then getting the Meade LPI settings right to pick up the target star , used Guidedog for this . Did some trials using the LX as the guiding scope and the Orion ED as the imager, got a lot of fine tuning to do but i was happy with some results eg: 15min one exposures of swan/Lagoon
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/DSC_0002Medium.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/DSC_0001Medium.jpg
Sky conditions were very strange last night , no clouds but the whole 360 degree horizon had a weird red tinge illumination and skyglow was bad , trying to get a decent Mars image later in the evening was next to impossible and some others like the Helix nebula arnt worth displaying :confuse2: . I really wanted to get a NGC253 image but halfway through the shot the battery for the D70 ran dry but managed to get this noise infested shot :ashamed:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/DSC_0007Small.jpg