STFN

I'm going back to astrophotography

astrophotography
5 minutes

I’m slowly going back to astrophotography.

So far my best year in AP was 2022 (apart from the famous comet), as my Astrobin gallery shows.

Since then I either have not had the time, or the energy, or the weather was awful for weeks. Also the last year or so I have been fighting with equipments problems, stopping me from doing any useful work.

But I’m coming back, I want to come back and do it again, as I find it to be a fascinating hobby, combining space, physics, and computers.

The future looks promising, as (if everything goes well) I will be moving to a house at the end of his year, and then doing AP will mean simply going outside, and not needing to drive 30km to a good place. That should make things much simpler.

Back to present, I went out to try doing AP again twice in the last week, three days ago and yesterday. While the equpiment problems are still not solved, I managed to get at least something, and I quite like the result. So let me share it with you (looks better in dark mode, click for a larger version):

This is the Alpha Persei Cluster, an open cluster of stars in the middle of the constellation of Perseus.

The brightest star near the middle is Mirfak, Alpha Persei. Most of the bright stars in the picture belong to the same cluster (group) of stars, living relatively close to each other. I especially like σ Persei (delta Persei), the one closer to the left of the image, with its beautiful, deep yellow colour. The whole cluster is around 560 light years from us.

I took the information above from Wikipedia, and I invite you to read more on the cluster on its Wikipedia page at that site that we need to cherish and it’s again attacked by right wingers, as most good things in life.

the parts below will mostly be interesting for people deep into AP

Acquisition details

90 x 60s exposures. Acquisition controlled using Stellarmate OS, and EKOS in kStars. Calibration frames: flats and bias (I need to redo my dark library).

Stacked in Pixinsight using FastBatchPreprocessing.

Postprocessing:

A touch of curves and saturation in GIMP.

Equipment problems

The problem is simple: I cannot guide. The most frustrating part is that guiding used to just work for me in the past, and now it does not.

Since guiding stopped working, I replaced the guiding camera, most of the cables, the Raspberry Pi and the OS from Astroberry to Stellarmate. I’ve sent the mount to a person who services mounts and said everything was fine with the mount, except for a loose cable (which I already replaced). The last hardware thing for me to test is to replace the “telephone” cable between the mount and the mount pilot, and I will do it as soon as RJ12 connectors arrive by post.

Both in EKOS and PHD2, the guiding calibration cannot finish, as the software is not able to move the mount enough. Slewing is working fine, GOTO too. Mount is connected, the guiding camera is doing the images. Polar alignment is as precise as it is possible, done with the polar alignment helper in EKOS. The mount is tracking, I can do 60s exposures at 150mm focal length without issues. But when it comes to the actual guiding, nothing happens. Calibration fails and guiding does not work.

I’ve digged through the web several times, and other people seemed to have similar issues, but their solutions did not help me.

I think I just need to spend the night doing debugging, testing all possible combinations of settings. I have this feeling that the actual cause is very basic and would be obvious to many people, but I don’t have anyone experienced in AP who would join me on site. And to do actual, proper debugging I need to sit next to mount without haste for a long time, which is not the easiest thing when it’s -10C outside.

If I don’t find a solution anytime soon, I will probably write a few long posts on some internet forums, not sure which one, either the INDI one, or the one for Stellarmate, or astropolis.pl (the one which I usually visit).

Eh, anyway, it’s good to have a blog, at least I can vent my frustrations here :)

But on the other hand, even with all those issues, being under a night sky in the dark, and just watching it is a joy. I have a pair of cheap binoculars, and for the price they show me wonders. It is a very calming experience and makes me want to go back and try again, and even if I cannot take a good picture, I can at least take a good look.

Thanks for reading!