rat156
11-09-2010, 04:09 PM
Hi all,
Slowly coming to terms with the new scope. I tried collimating it last night, but only succeeded in making it worse, now fixed in daylight thanks to the Tak collimating scope, still need to star test though.
I've also been having trouble with the guiding, last night was more to do with the seeing being rubbish, but I keep getting drift when I guide, so that the AO unit runs out of adjustment and has to bump the mount. This is obviously a polar alignment issue. I have the G11 on a very fine pier made by a local guru, so the pier is fine, but it was made for my Meade fork mount, so was a little low for the G11, so I made an adapter...out of PVC pipe. Don't laugh, it's been working pretty well up until now. I decided that this must be flexing under the load when the scope shifts, so as to stuff up the polar alignment.
A trip or two to Bunnings and now I have removed the PVC and have post supports under the tripod top section, attached to the top of the pier. Solid as a rock now, just have to drift align again and I'll see if I've solved that one.
Anyway, bereft of clear nights down here, so even though the seeing was very poor here last night, I spent a fair bit of it imaging. Here's a pretty average M20 as a result, it has collimation errors, guiding errors, light pollution and probably a myriad of other problems, but it's an image, so I'll post it anyway.
LRGB image, 60, 30, 30, 30 mins, all unbinned (the stars were blooming too quickly).
Cheers
Stuart
Slowly coming to terms with the new scope. I tried collimating it last night, but only succeeded in making it worse, now fixed in daylight thanks to the Tak collimating scope, still need to star test though.
I've also been having trouble with the guiding, last night was more to do with the seeing being rubbish, but I keep getting drift when I guide, so that the AO unit runs out of adjustment and has to bump the mount. This is obviously a polar alignment issue. I have the G11 on a very fine pier made by a local guru, so the pier is fine, but it was made for my Meade fork mount, so was a little low for the G11, so I made an adapter...out of PVC pipe. Don't laugh, it's been working pretty well up until now. I decided that this must be flexing under the load when the scope shifts, so as to stuff up the polar alignment.
A trip or two to Bunnings and now I have removed the PVC and have post supports under the tripod top section, attached to the top of the pier. Solid as a rock now, just have to drift align again and I'll see if I've solved that one.
Anyway, bereft of clear nights down here, so even though the seeing was very poor here last night, I spent a fair bit of it imaging. Here's a pretty average M20 as a result, it has collimation errors, guiding errors, light pollution and probably a myriad of other problems, but it's an image, so I'll post it anyway.
LRGB image, 60, 30, 30, 30 mins, all unbinned (the stars were blooming too quickly).
Cheers
Stuart