Before I left for the meeting, since it was late enough in the afternoon that my lemon tree shadowed my rig, I opened it up and got things connected. I realized, however, that I needed my tablet for my presentation, since I use my main laptop (Cherenkov) for the slides and my tablet (Messier) for my notes. Fortunately, on a whim, I had booted up both Cherenkov and my older laptop, Feynman, to install updates, since I hadn't used either in a little while. So I grabbed Feynman and hooked it up to the scope. I used it at the Texas Star Party to run my second rig, so it already had all my software and drivers installed, and I keep my Sequence Generator Pro sequences in a OneDrive folder so I can access them on any of my machines. I tested to make sure that Feynman could indeed control the mount, and then I changed a setting for my camera so that it wouldn't start cooling until the sequence started, since it was definitely not going to be able to reach -15C when it was 25C outside. I didn't have time to install TeamViewer, so I just had to cross my fingers that it would work.
After the meeting, I had some long conversations with other members about aspects of my talk and other cosmological questions, and I made a mental list of questions I needed to research that people brought up, like how does dark matter interact with black holes? I also talked about astrophotography, and ended up getting home after 1 AM. To my dismay, my telescope was in the home position, even though I set the sequence to run until 2 AM. I went to check out why, and a plate solve had failed on the first target, and the sequence had quit! I forgot that setting the sequence failure option of re-attempting every x minutes for x hours was not an option of the sequence, but in the options for SGP itself, so when I imported the sequence, that didn't come with it. So I turned that option on and restarted the sequence to get just 45 minutes of data on M74 before the moon got too high. Darn, half a night wasted!
M74, single 3-minute exposure
ZWO ASI294MC Pro, Takahashi FSQ-106N
Here's a single shot of M74. Not much to see yet, but the power of stacking will reveal all!
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