Clear sky but breezy

Finally had a decent day with something worth imaging.  New active regions just coming around the limb, but the seeing made it difficult to get a good image.  Also, had a nice long 3 hour broadcast on NSN.

New wireless focuser in use

Finally got my wireless remot system running for as far as the focusing goes.  Now to get the mount control working before winter.

 

The parts I used are:

12v Power Supply Inocircuit 5A 12V 

12v Led pwm controller LedWholesalers pwm controller 

12v Wireless remote kit Chinese Shipped remote kit 

2 - 12v Relays DPDT 12v relay  

If your handy with electronics, its not hard to wire up the kit, and it works from 400ft and will control any 9-12v stepper motor or servo motor.  You'll need two 12v DPDT relays wired in this configuration to make a forward/reverse configuration.  Rov forward/reverse wiring with two relays

If your interested in building one and have further questions, shoot me an email at shafner@bektel.com

Fought the wind and tranparency

Started out as a very foggy morning so I knew the transparency wasn't going to be so great, but I had the clearest sky I've seen in a long time.  Capturing 10,000 frames really helps to find enough good frames to stack.  Just couldn't get rid of the gradients in the first image.

New Focuser New Mount

Finally got the new focuser for the 80mm, and instantly modified it with some teflon mouse tape to shim and remove the focuser slop, it now turns as smooth as butter like a $150 dollar focuser.  Cloudy and windy, but the new mount is much more solid with the little scope so didn't have much for shaking issues.

Two attempts at AR2135

Rigged up the solar filter from the 80mm to work on the 114mm, and took a few videos.  Kinda crummy conditions today with the wind pushing the scope around and thin clouds passing by.  The first capture came out really noisy, but the second one at a faster framerate came out a little better.

Dual monitors

I finally got out to test my new Ioptron Cube Pro mount.  It definately tracks better than the old smartstar mount with just a lunar alignment and sync to target.  Had to dust off the old astromaster 114 for the night, and did a daytime artificial star collimation to get the optics lined up again.  And, of course I had to broadcast on NSN for an hour or so, just because its been so long since I had the chance. 

 

After Work Solar Session

Actually had some pretty clear skies after work, so I set up to where I could get a low horizon.  Transparency wasn't the greatest but the stacked images came out pretty good.  Especially the region of interest crop taken at 180fps for 5000 frames, should have gone for 10,000 or more to stack a higher percentage.  I was able to use some very high level wavelett sharpening in Registax and still had very little noise.