Here in Kampala, on the Equator, it is rare to have nice clear skies at night. So when it happens randomly, I need to run up on the roof, set up my mount, and go through the long process of polar aligning by the Polar Iteration method, as I cannot see either polar region. So last weekend it happened. I was getting ready to crawl into bed at midnight, and looked out my window to see stars! Sleep be dammed. I made the three trips to roof carrying my CEM26P, battery box, and all the scope gear. In the dark, I set up the mount, leveled it, and pointed it north using my iPhone’s compass. I live at 00 degrees, 019 minutes, so here I am North. If I drive an hour to my other astro site and it’s in the Southern Hemisphere. Anyway, I started the polar iterate alignment routine on the CEM25P, expecting this to take a long time, and was pleasantly surprised that I was very close already! After four iterations, I was almost dead on – not perfect, but close enough I hoped.
I started up my NanoPC-T4, which starts up from a cold power-on to being ready to log on with VNC in six seconds. EKOS loaded all my gear (mount via wifi, ASI1600MM, EFW, LodeStar X2, and Moonlight focuser. I image through a WO Star71.
High overhead was Orion, but I decided to image the Rosette. I wanted to do this narrow band, and decoded to start with Ha. I set up a program to capture 20 x 120 second images in HA, the 20 in OIII, and 20 in SII. Using KStars, I directed the mount ton slew to the Rosette, and then started the alignment with astrometry. The NanoPC is fast, and I was dead on to the nebula in about 60 seconds. Next, I autofocused through the Ha filter, and that went quick too – about another minute.
But when I tried to calibrate the autoguider it failed. It was that bug that doesn’t let it calibrate – which I have seen before. So I switched the “via” option to the Lodestar camera itself, which I know wouldn’t work because I was not using an ST4 cable. But I have found that if I do this, then let the system fail again, and then switch the “via” back to the mount, it would calibrate fine. As before, this worked.
Then I was pleasantly surprised to see that the guiding was very tight!
I started the program and began capturing the images without a problem. But after 11 images, clouds came over and I had to stop the session. I was disappointed with the weather, but that’s the price I pay for working in this part of the world. So I moved the equipment back under cover and went to bed, at 2:30 AM.
I hope to be able to grab the rest of the data, but this is one of two rainy seasons here, so I may have to wait until January – and by then, the Rosette may be too low.
So here is the single Ha exposure, at just 22 minutes of time. I want to double the exposure time to remove more noise, but that too will have to wait. Clear skies to you! I have none.