Well. 3-1/2 years since my last blog entry. Why? I forgot I started a blog.
It has been a long and rich journey since my last entry. Primarily, my son, Josh Smith, has become an avid imager whom I can proudly say is much more skilled than me. I am delighted to have helped him to get started and to have a partner for some “cow pasture nights” and “astronomy road trips”. He has some wonderful images and a passion for astrophotography that is remarkable.
I have also traveled to three Okie-Tex Star Parties, two NEAFs, one NEAIC, one Texas Star party, one Almost Heaven Star Party, and am heading home from the 2015 Winter Star Party. I have upgraded (or at least changed) telescopes several times, changed cameras a few times, and just recently retired my Atlas mount for a brand new Astro-Physics 1100GTO… a gift from my beautiful wife. More subtly, I have improved my documentation (believe it or not) and data management, worked on processing techniques, switched to CCD-Stack for assembling raw frames, and a number of other improvements.
Perhaps I will try to highlight some of the things I have learned and some of my experiences over the last 3-1/2 years, but for now, I am going to settle for simply trying to keep up with what I am doing now and what I will be doing going forward as I get used to using the 1100GTO. Short term goals are to roll out motorized and automated focusing, and switch over to Sequence Generator Pro (SGP) for image acquisition. At least once temperatures increase a little.
With the new mount also came the opportunity to re-think how things might be done differently. One reason for this is the ability to route my cables through the mount. To make this more reasonable, I am attempting to mount all the electronics on the top side of the mount. This results in only having to route one power cable, one USB cable and one Cat 5 cable through the mount. I plan to eventually use the Cat 5 cable to allow me to move the command center (me) more than 5 meters from the scope. This will be via an ICRON range extender. The nearby image shows much of the electronics attached to a heavy dovetail with industrial Velcro. I’ll get another picture when everything is completely set up.
Coming home from the WSP, I find a number of items in my job jar:
- Better understand plate solving and focusing in SGP
- More familiarity with SGP in general
- Debug the Moonlight focuser installation on AT10
- Figure out how to make reducer work on AT10
- Figure out better guiding PHD parameters for AT10 setup
- Build several cases
Clear Skies!