SESSION 24 · 11/26 · WORKED
A Saturn worth keeping
Saturn on the 127 with the ZWO, at 20 ms and gain 335, near its highest. The planet drifted out of the frame all night even with tracking on, and the stacker had to chase it. Twenty-four recordings…
GEAR · IN USE
SVBONY SV205
USB colour camera doing lunar and planetary duty. Cheap, capable, and only if it gets a USB 3.0 link.
Driven by AstroDMx Capture 2.18.2 on the ThinkPad. Captures land in ~/AstroDMx_DATA/,
app config in ~/.AstroDMx/.
Two things define working with it: it needs a genuine USB 3.0 link or its best mode vanishes from the descriptor entirely, and it has no gain control, so exposure time is the only brightness lever.
Used on these nights
SESSION 23 · 10/26 · WORKED
First light for the ZWO
First night with the ZWO ASI662MC, on the 127 Mak with the SV205 moved to the finder. Saturn came out soft in sixteen recordings, which I blamed on my focus; the numbers said seeing. After midnight…
SESSION 22 · 10/26 · WORKED
The setting Moon from the back yard
Two nights in one entry. 26/10 clouded out. On 27/10 the Moon came up behind the verandah and into cloud, and an 8x5 at 23:00 got the lower two thirds before power lines blacked it out. At dawn…
SESSION 21 · 10/26 · WORKED
The whole Moon in one piece
A day before full, on the 127 Mak and the AZ-GTi, in wind. The laptop ran out of power mid-session and the mount found the Moon again from where it had stopped. A 7x5 mosaic at 14 ms and a patch…
SESSION 20 · 10/26 · DIDN'T WORK
A gibbous Moon, and a grid that would not stay on it
A 91% gibbous Moon on the 127 Mak and the AZ-GTi. The finder-to-Mak offset from last week worked first time, focus was good and one 300-frame run stacked cleanly. Then three mosaic attempts in forty…
SESSION 19 · 10/26 · PARTLY WORKED
Two half-misses make one Moon, and Saturn in the wrong hole
The best sky of the spring. Two 43-panel lunar mosaics on the AZ-GTi, 128 GB each, every goto within two arcseconds, but each grid missed most of the Moon; stitched together, the two make a complete…
SESSION 18 · 10/26 · PARTLY WORKED
The helper ran out halfway through
Codex rebuilt a lot of rig-ui during the day and helped drive the evening until its usage limit cut it off at 20:04. I shot the 7x4 mosaic myself at 20:28. It ran to 25 panels, but the grid sat too…
SESSION 17 · 10/26 · WORKED
Saturn in colour, with AstroDMx
An AstroDMx night with the 127 on the AZ-GTi and no agent driving: 38 runs of 50 full-size frames, the crescent from 19:29 and Saturn from 21:19. Codex could not reach the rig from its sandbox and…
SESSION 16 · 10/26 · PARTLY WORKED
Thirty-five panels, and a dimming I never explained
The 127 on the AZ-GTi, run from the mount's hotspot. A 35-panel crescent mosaic at 19:44, anchored 11 arcminutes off the disc centre with a new shift option; a second, softer one after the image…
SESSION 15 · 10/26 · PARTLY WORKED
The Moon in the 127, found by eye
A night of near misses with the 127 and the AZ-GTi: the mount's WiFi link lost half its packets, the house power went out, the finder-to-Mak offset turned out to be more than a degree and a…
SESSION 14 · 10/26 · PARTLY WORKED
First light for the 127, with the mount asleep
The 127 Mak's first frames of sky: an 8% crescent at 15 degrees, hand-pointed and untracked, craters along the terminator in a 50-frame PNG run. The AZ-GTi never spoke to the laptop all night - its…
SESSION 13 · 09/26 · WORKED
The whole Moon, and a search that found Saturn
A complete Moon at last - 24 panels, 100% of the sunlit disc, measured and not just looked at - and my first Saturn, rings and all, in a single overexposed frame. On the way: a spiral search built…
SESSION 12 · 09/26 · PARTLY WORKED
Still not a complete Moon, and I said it was
Best image yet and still 11.8% of the sunlit disc missing. Three launches, a plate scale that had been 15% wrong all along, and a centring error of 8'.
SESSION 11 · 09/26 · WORKED
A mount that answered every question and refused to move
The best sky in weeks, and two hours lost to a mount that talked happily and would not turn. Saturn is a fortnight from opposition.
SESSION 10 · 09/26 · PARTLY WORKED
The only thing that worked was the thing I came to test
I went out in a gale to do one job: make the mount keep following the Moon while a panel is being exposed. That job is done, measured, and finished. Almost everything else about the evening went…
SESSION 9 · 09/26 · PARTLY WORKED
Every goto was perfect and the picture still didn't line up
The night I found out the mosaic was never going to work the way it was built. Every goto landed within an arcsecond — seventy-two panels across two grids — and the tiles still did not line up…
SESSION 8 · 09/26 · WORKED
The mount moved on its own, forty-eight times, and every one of them was where I sent it
The night the laptop drove the telescope. INDI could connect but never finish a goto, so the mount went on raw motor-controller commands instead: a 0.05 degree test that landed to one arcsecond…
SESSION 7 · 09/26 · WORKED
Five metres of cable, an altitude limit, and an eyepiece where the camera should have been
Four and a half hours between first question and first frame, almost none of it spent on the sky. A new five-metre USB cable that would not enumerate, an altitude limit I had set and forgotten, a…
SESSION 6 · 09/26 · WORKED
Eight degrees of compass, a cloud of mosquitoes, and Venus in the last twenty minutes
Lost the first hour and a half to a pointing error I have been guessing at since 30 August and finally measured: 7.4 degrees of azimuth, which is Goolwa's magnetic declination. Two false trails, a…
SESSION 5 · 09/26 · WORKED
A real crescent, a rainbow I didn't ask for, and an argument about focus
First proper Venus: a 31% crescent, 35 arcseconds across, lit side to the horizon. Confirmed the image scale off the disc, measured the dispersion, and then argued with the numbers about whether it…
SESSION 5 · 09/26 · DIDN'T WORK
A new tube, two nights, and not one frame of sky
Got the 76/700 on the mount and pointed it at nothing successfully. Cloud, a finder I never aligned, and a field of view the size of a keyhole. The morning's daylight testing is where the actual…
SESSION 4 · 08/26 · DIDN'T WORK
First planet — Venus, low in the west, and nothing to see on it
Pointed at Venus instead of the Moon on the rebuilt mount. Three short runs so far. Learned that most of what limits a low planet has nothing to do with the telescope.
SESSION 2 · 08/26 · WORKED
Three analysis methods, all wrong — and the reason was in the frame the whole time
Built a processing stack and tried to rank the night's runs by sharpness. Every metric disagreed with my eyes. The bug wasn't in the metrics — it was that the lunar disc runs off the edge of the…
SESSION 3 · 08/26 · PARTLY WORKED
New swivel, a focus lever, and a darker patch of yard
Three changes at once before tonight: the mount is rebuilt onto a friction-loaded roller-bearing swivel, the focuser has a long lever instead of a knob, and I'm setting up out the back away from the…
SESSION 1 · 08/26 · PARTLY WORKED
First light — and a cable that lied to me
Got the SV205 talking to AstroDMx and the Moon onto the sensor. Burned most of the session on two failures that both presented as camera limitations and were neither.