Going away to another great
ASWA Astro Camp on the weekend just gone, using my portable setup (Losmandy GM8 + Megrez + guide scope + 350D + QGUIder) and then coming home to the bliss of my observatory has got me contemplating my options again.
If you're bored and feel like reading on and giving your thoughts feel free...
I find that using the portable setup is very labour intensive. I never end up with any free time in the night for anything but attending to astrophotography issues. This wasn't always the case... Back in th days of using my Pentax SLR it would focus at infinity, and I would manually guide. So my setup times were a fraction of what they are now. If I were lucky (polar alignment) I'd not have to guide for a few exposures and have a chat to people then. Generally, it was much more relaxing.
Now, I find that I'm alway battling some sort of issue, usually focus or guiding.
This weekend gone was particularly smooth running, very enjoyable from the perspective of equipment problems (lack there of). My polar alignment was great, the QGuider picked up guide stars easily, the 350D was working nice, power grid and data grid ran fine, Focus was OK but always needed tweaking.
Yet with such a successful time of the equipment side, I still didn't end up with many free moments to go wandering, chat to friends, and observe visually through other equipment
And I ended up with very few images to show for it, primarily for three reasons: (1) forgot to use the WO minus-violet filter, so colour fringing is horrendous (2) I used ICNR which roughly halved my number of shots (3) bizzar unexplainable trailing in wide field shots - will post a thread later elsewhere.
I think I'll not use ICNR again for these 5min exposure time shots. And hopefully I'll remember the minus-violet filter.
Then there's focusing .... Used to be so easy, but now so hard.. I get a star (preferrably a double, with a dimmer partner star) sharply in focus using my Orion electronic focus attached to the Megrez, watching the star image in DSLRFocus. That is quite quick. Then I take 5 min exposures and the stars look slightly out of focus
It's hard to improve on that, when the my focus images would need to be long before they showed a problem.
The violet colour problem of the Megrez really can only be solved by a new OTA I think, but that's $$$. I know some tricks in PS, but with only PS5.05 I can't run the astro tool filter plugins out there for removing it.
I can't help but keep thinking if I sold the portable setup the money I'd get for it together with my savings and selling my ST7 would get me a very nice SBIG for the observatory
... where the telescope and camera "just work" night after night after night with little more effort than turning them on.
Unlike the Losmandy that seems to need it's gears tweaking, and still doesn't perform noticably better than my trusty LX200, and the Megrez with it's colour.
But then what would I do in the field.... I know I'd want to do some wide field imaging pretty soon, then I'd be left back at square one again... hmmmm.
I wonder if other astro photographer's find they can "set and forget" their equipment more while out in the field than what I can? I wonder if there's some way to improve my focussing...
I'm the only one in ASWA at these camp's doing this stuff, so have nothing to compare to or learn from.
And I wonder why it is I seem to be having trouble with trailing in wide field shots when autoguiding ... odd, they should be so easy, they used to be.. hmmm.
Hmmmm..
