Same session with the 49.5s target time today, and I made all the reps comfortably, so next time the target drops to 49s.
But… Big news of the day was doing another “fast fifty” at 39.17s! Frankly I’m astonished to have dropped so much time in one go. It suggests that more really ought to be possible.
USRPT distance this year: 171,100m
Total distance this year: 219,300m
Three nights on the bounce! But this one was a bit of an adventure. What was foreast as a few of hours of clear sky after the Moon rose stopped about two minutes after I kicked off the run to collect my subs at 1:15am and I ended up with about thirty that were ok and many more that were varying shades of dark. I decided to hang around for a while on the off-chance I might get another go and just before 2am clear sky reappeared, allowing me to complete another run. In the end I had 135 passable subs and threw away 65 without even considering processing them.
1/500th subs at ISO800, preprocessed with PIPP, stacked in AS!3, wavelets in Registax 6 and finished off with PS.
A repeat of yesterday’s session, but today I made all the reps. One more time and I’ll drop the target time again. No “fast fifty” at the end today though.
USRPT distance this year: 169,300m
Total distance this year: 217,500m
Two nights in a row clear enough to get an image of the Moon! Best 45 of 100 frames from the 450D and 127 Mak again, but this time 1/500th sec exposure to try to reduce the effects of wobbly seeing, and I had to bump the ISO setting up to 800 as a result. Preprocessed with PIPP, then stacked in AS!3, wavelets in Registax 6 and a final bit of fiddling about and conversion to PNG in PS.
The pool has cooled a little now, so I have decided to go back to proper USRPT sessions, with a target time of 49.5 seconds:
Unfortunately I had a couple of fails, demonstrating my lack of practice, but it’s good to be back on the horse again.
I also did a “fast fifty” at the end of the set, with the stopwatch reading 40.36 when I hit the wall. I guess I can’t get faster every time 🙂
USRPT distance this year: 167,500m
Total distance this year: 215,700m
So, a newly-aligned mount and just past full Moon, what’s a chap to do? Well, when the sky gives you moons, make moon images!
I broke out the 127 Mak and 450D and dropped them on top of the HEQ5. It doesn’t really know where the Moon is yet because I don’t have a sufficiently good sky model, but with a little nudging I was on-target and the tracking was certainly ok.
I captured 100 frames of 1/200th at ISO200 for this image, and then had a devil of a job getting them to stack in Registax (after preprocessing with PIPP), which kept locking up during stacking. I gave up and tried stackistry. Whilst that did a mostly good job, it fouled up the limb. AutoStakkert!3 came to my rescue and gave me a stacked image that I pulled into Registax for wavelets and then finished off in Photoshop.
As mentioned in an earlier post, the last mount in my observatory cannot be polar aligned directly as it has no view of the celestial pole. After giving things a bit of time I decided I’d just have to bite the bullet and return to drift aligning using PHD2. This time however, though I’m sure it makes little difference, I used PHD2 on the same Linux laptop I’d already used to align the other two mounts.
The process is identical to that in the Windows version, but I think having had a bit of practice with the easier plate-solving alignment system in Ekos, I felt a bit more confident about what I was doing. I used Kstars to pick alignment targets as close to the “ideal” positions as possible and this time I really didn’t struggle that much with the adjustments. The azimuth adjustment was actually relatively straightforward and whilst the adjusters again make the alt adjustment more tricky, after three or four iterations I still got to within about one arcminute of the pole. The obvious thing to take from this would seem to be that “practice counts”.
I do now feel quite happy with the idea of taking the HEQ5 on holiday, say, and setting it up from scratch using either method. I think that’s a good step forward.
I hope today is the last day when I feel the pool is too warm to do a proper USRPT session. The weather has been much cooler for a month now and the water temperature has definitely started to drop.
I did another “fast fifty” as my final rep of the session. I didn’t get a great turn and I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest. Hit the wall at the shallow end and stopped the clock, looked down to see what I’d done…
Most chuffed. That’s actually going to take a bit of beating.
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 213,900m
There’s a definite feeling that the pool is starting to cool down now. Give it a few more days and I think we should be sorted. “Fast fifty” today was 40.84s! Under the 41s straight away. Most pleased with that.
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 212,100m
A day or so after adding the yeast to my Blobservatory Bitter, it looks like they’re hard at work. A nice raft of top-fermenting yeasty beasties…
