first night imaging in 6 years (well. first productive one anyway)
After a very long break during which I did everything from having kids to building a drift car I'm happy to say I'm back in action.
After buying this heq5 and having nothing but troubles with it I stripped it down, cleaned and re-greased the lot, did a belt drive modification and spent a few hours trimming the worm meshing I finally had a night where everything went pretty much to plan.
Polar alignment could have been better. Spent about 5 minutes on it using ccdsoft in focus mode and adjusting the mount as I saw drift. Quick drive calibration and I was away.
Neither of these are award winners by any stretch but they represent my first productive night by the scope in 6 years. Took a lot of work getting there and rebooting my memory relearning how to use ccdsoft, how to tweak guiding settings to get the result you want. How to set the whole lot up. Haha... But here they are.
M8 and M16. Both are around 1 hour of 5 minute subs, sbig st2000xcm self guided with a celestron c130slt.
6 YEARS... and I thought my 6 month absence was bad enough.
Good start there. Was considering imaging myself last night but the wind didn't abate much in my locale - still windy in fact. Seeing looked NICE though last night with nary a twinkle.
