[Screwdriverone (Chris)]

Hi all,

Had a successful but long night last night and this morning working out the kinks to see if I can get guiding working through the 8x50mm guidescope using the toucam.

After fiddling with focus, alignment to the main scope, sorting out polar alignment, finding things with the DSLR and the guidecam fitted, playing with EQMod and stellarium, I found out a few things....

Maxim DL doesnt want to drive the DSLR and the webcam at the same time.... used the EOS II driver on cam 1 for the 1000D and the WebDS camera for the toucam on camera 2. Wasted at least 1.5-2 hours stuffing around with this and got nada. Thinking the lappy doesnt have enough graphics and processor grunt to run it all.

Ended up getting PHD working at the same time as the canon utility and spent maybe an hour playing with and learning PHD and all of a sudden (after I stopped being impatient and did the right steps) guiding was all green and good SNR. I could also see and hear the scope pulse guiding through the eqmod interface after I adjusted the pulse settings.

End result was the guiding was working well, so with only an hour or so before sunrise, I tried some 60 secs and some 5 minute subs on Eta Carinae. I had 5 x 60 secs in the can and 5 x 5 minutes but could only keep 2 of the 5 minutes as light cloud drifted in.

More importantly, for half an hour, the guiding was working like a charm!!! The only way is up from here.

So, here is at least some sort of result. I am not too concerned with the quality or the processing for now, simply rapt that I got some tighter stars for longer than 30 sec subs for once. Can't get the MPCC inline without modding the 2" adaptor to cut it down, so I simply used the 1.25" adaptor and trimmed off the outer third of the image with the most coma in it. Still a bit of work to sort out the focus and the processing, but at least I have a plan now on how to get it all cranking (after investing 7 hours playing around trying things out).

Thanks for looking, as I said, I am not too concerned with quality at the moment, more for the practice and testing of the guiding, but feel free to comment, good or bad....

Image Details:

Date: 27/2/11
Time: 4:16am - 4:21am
Subject: NGC 3372 Eta Carinae Nebula (Keyhole/Homonculus?) 60% cropped to remove outer coma
Telescope: Black Diamond 200mm Reflector @ F5 on HEQ5 Pro
Camera: Canon 1000D
Capture: Canon EOS Utility
Guiding: YES - Toucam on 8x50mm finder using PHD
Frames: 5 x 60 second at ISO 800, 1 x Dark Frame
Processing: Registax 4 only for gamma, gimp for black point.

Sorry for such a long post,

Cheers

Chris