Last updated on February 27th, 2022 at 09:06 pm
Get EKOS to talk and control Skywatcher Az-GTI mount
https://indilib.org/devices/telescopes/az-gti.html (make sure to use the driver below)
Get EKOS to talk to and control ASI guide camera
AstroBackyard.com has a lot of information which can save the hobby for those just starting out. One of the key design elements used in my setup is a wide field of view lens. This hobby is really hard to get right to start with especially in places were you have a very light polluted sky. Looking through a soda straw with very little reference stars can make this hobby almost impossible until you learn the sky. Most of these objects are much bigger than you think so a wide field of view lens will allow you capture those beautiful objects.
First really cool clear night in some time. Was able to really focus on the mechanics of the setup. Helical focuser works great and was able to auto-glide somewhat tonight. Successful with Orion Nebula in gliding but when I moved over to Andromeda got errors saying it could not get back to starting position after 21 attempts.
Since I work with a Mac finding a stacker is a challenge. For now I installed VirtualBox and ran a Win10 instance within it to get DeepSkyStacker running. Ended up with a good picture of the Orion nebula however the Andromeda was washed out after DSS stacked. Still looking for solutions on that. I submitted for a trial license for PixInsight.
Battery life gets me about 3-4 hours but the setup time to get polar aligned and everything talking through kStars was about one hour of that time.
Need to work on the workflow setup. Getting the mount to connect to the home network was more of a pain than others. This may be a result of a quick change over in the iPhone once the mount connects. I was finally able to get this to work by connecting to the mount, changing the mount to station mode and clicking applying. Then as fast as possible closing the SyncScan App and moving the phone over to the home network. I think the phone was getting the telescope wifi too quickly and was putting it into AP mode again. Make sure all batteries are installed. Get rig level and set as close to home position as possible. Focus main camera first. Focus glide camera second. Then polar align. Will probably look for a larger battery around the 7000maH looks like would work well.
Plate solving was nice new feature we investigated tonight. This allowed for correction of the telescope mount when trying to center a target. Capture and Slew started a plate solving process which then provided a correction vector on the planetarium viewer to recenter the target and ended up with each target dead center in the camera. This was helpful for a wide field of view camera but I would image this is required for a larger focal length “deeper” telescope.
Auto Gliding was the next feature we looked into tonight. I was able to get a successful glide once but after than it did not work again the rest of the evening. This was using the Astroberry glide and not PHD2. May try to use the PHD2 version next time to see if I can get more details on what may be causing the problem. I will also need get the mount counterbalances ASAP. We will need to really dive into the gliding issue I found tonight with the next opportunity.
Burn Astroberry to MicroSD card
Get EKOS to talk and control Skywatcher Az-GTI mount
https://indilib.org/devices/telescopes/az-gti.html (make sure to use the driver below)
Get EKOS to talk to and control ASI guide camera
