AUSSIESCIENCE CLIPS.
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STARLOG · TARGET
Every night Moon was the target, from Goolwa, South Australia, newest first.
SESSION 23 · 10/26 · WORKED
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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 2 · 08/26 · WORKED
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
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
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.