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Hi Dave,
That looks great.
But cant you cut a hole in the roof of the tent so you can just zip up in the morning?
I've been thinking of a tent as well.
would be good if the tent is modified to just cover the ota and mount when its horizontally parked. that way, it'll clear the opening during normal use.
there was a qld company selling this tent for $300 I think.
what do you use for your sequenced capture? i'm currently evaluating SGP,
below is what I do or am testing, may or may not be of any use.
with SGP, it looks like you can set a whole night's run on it as it slews, centres, auto starts guiding with phd and aborts if the guide star is lost.
same with the meridian flip. all automated.
I then set an auto park with eqascom to park after 10 hours, and then with maxim, run the skyflats plugin to capture sky flats at dawn with a target ADU.
I also use a $5 timer that powers everything, to switch off at 6am. that way the CCD doesn't need to keep its cooling running till I wake up in the morning, and I have a laptop in the box under the mount that's set to hibernate when on battery after 15 mins.
so objective is to power down everything at 6am automatically, and lappy hibernates at 6:15.
scope should face south, so no risk of direct heat on the scopes optics and ccd.
I also use eqascom to save and load alignment points on startup, so if there are a few clear nights, I don't have to redo all the alignment.
currently looking at adding a series of bright stars to an SGP sequence with 30second exposures.
That way, SGP can slew to a star, plate solve, centre, then sync mount, adding a sync point and continue for however many bright stars i add.
something like maxpoint or Tpoint. So I'd end up with atleast 10 sync points.
I'm yet to test this.
I'm however using an eqascom script to do the ccd polar alignment slew. that works great. i have one for 30s, 1m, 2m, 4m.
by the end of the 4m run, my PA is very very close.
Hope its of some help.
Cheers
Alistair
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