Tuesday, November 5, 2019

#248 - Monday, November 4, 2019 - One Can Only Have So Much Good Luck

Another night of weird little anomalies.  First, Sequence Generator Pro wouldn't connect to my mount for some reason -- well, it would connect, but when I tried to start the sequence, it said that the scope was parked, and thus it couldn't slew it.  After restarting SGP a couple of times and unplugging and re-plugging stuff, I figured out that I had forgotten to disconnect the mount from Cartes du Ciel last night, so it still had an iron grip on the ASCOM driver or something.  I disconnected it, re-connected in SGP and PHD, and finally it started working!

The sequence aborted itself during NGC 2174 after not having any visible guide stars for a while.  The last PHD autoguiding image before it quit showed a blank frame.  It was pointing at the wall again...I'll have to double-check that I didn't do something else dumb to mess up the timing.

M45 before it went all right, but it looked like autoguiding hadn't worked at all, since the stars were all streaked.

Rawr!  Paying my tithes to the astronomy gods I guess for having so many clear nights and a telescope-able backyard...

On the bright side, I finally called Technical Innovations today about my malfunctioning Robofocus autofocuser unit, and they answered!  They said they didn't get any of my emails.  Hmph.  They told me it would cost $10 to replace a compoonent that frequently causes these weird issues, but if it's more complicated, they cap repairs at $75.  I'll take that any day over $200+ for a new one!  So I shipped it off.  Fingers crossed!  Really tired of losing otherwise perfectly good frames to poor focus.



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