Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Namid - Still lots of stuff...

After we traveled home, we decided to image M51 first. Easy, bright target, fits into our FOW. But during the next nights, quite a lot of stuff came up:
  • Turns our out polar alignment isn't great. It's 1'30" off. Nothing we can do about it now. At least our model will compensate for it. Need to improve next time somebody is at the scope.
  • 30 min exposures had slightly elongated stars. Tried to guide but that made it WAY worse. If I had to guess, I'd say it's differential flexure in some direction. Which means we can't guide right now - need to fix next time somebody is at the scope.
  • Port forward to ACP web interface and the power switch didn't work.
  • Delta-T app constantly segfaults.
    • Tried to update the firmware. But that failed.
    • Contacted Planewave support - never go a reply :-(
    • Talked to Tolga. He checked it and reduced the temperature difference of the main mirror from 2 to 1 degrees. That made it much more stable - though still fails once a night or so. He suspects that the power supply can't deliver enough power if the heaters are fully powered and other devices (camera, focuser...) are working at the same time.
      Will install second power supply plus direct power connection next time somebody is at the scope.
So, there are some things that still need to get done - planning on going early August for a week or so.

Other things we did:
  • Configure FocusMax
  • Configure Focusing with SGPro
  • Setting up filter wheel and filters in SGPro, TSX and ACP
  • In SGPro, we have to use "Mount Offset" for "Sync Behavior" - otherwise the mount does not improve pointing
  • Setup ACP for sky flats
  • Started taking bias, dark, flat and light frames ...

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