After many FITS and starts, I am finally capturing data with the my new telescope. I have had hardware problems software problems, and electronics problems. But finally I have data. I am currently imaging, so I hope I am not speaking to soon, I have all but the last few color frames of M 81.
Tonight did not start out too well. Having just replaced the entire wiring harness on the truck, it again has the “check engine” light on. I hope it is something minor. That did not set me in the best mood.
When I got things set up to start imaging, for some reason I was not getting any images from the camera. 20 minutes later I figured out that I had left the cap on the front of the camera, and didn’t see it because it is down inside of the mounting bracket.
The other thing that made tonight a little more difficult was that I am using a new computer. I resurrected my dead PC from a couple of years ago with a new motherboard so I would have a dedicated machine in the observatory. That meant that all the various pieces of software had to be configured to work. That took some time, but it is all working.
The Sky X works has been working more reliably on Win 7 64 bit than on XP Pro. Unfortunately my Lascar temperature logger does not work with Windows 7 64 bit so I still have the laptop in the observatory. Ultra VNC is working very well. I can fully monitor observatory operations from the house using my iPad.
I’ve been paranoid about dew all night, and the Telrad has dewed up a little bit. But the dew point is -3 C and the primary mirror is at zero, so I should not have any dew on the scope.
Just about another 40 minutes and I’ll be closing up and leaving the camera to take a bunch of darks. I sure do like the automation I do with CCD Commander, but that’s worth another post on its own.
8:30 AM Update. The dew point stayed below both the ambient and the primary mirror temperatures until I closed the roof. A that point the dew point shot up and I got dew and frost on the scope and on the primary mirror, possibly the secondary as well. It looked pretty bad last night but to day it looks ok. What it really means is that the dirt on the mirror will be hard to clean off.
The computer suffered a BSOD at a little after three am, so most of the darks I was trying to get were not captured. Hopefully this is not a recurring event.