Astro is hard, part 3
The saga continues…
The guide scope and camera arrived very quickly. Why is it that I can order something from China and have it arrive in 7 to 10 days, yet AusPost takes over two weeks to move something from Sydney to Melbourne?
Getting it setup was tricky - you need something a long distance away to get the guide scope focused. I ended up using a TV broadcast tower about 15km away. Which is nothing compared to how far away the stars are.
Now it’s a matter of getting the software all working. Ekos can see the guide camera and capture images with it, but I can’t get auto-guiding to work properly. More experimenting and testing things, which is very frustrating, as all the online tutorials I read imply that everything “just works” straight out of the box. Yeah, right.
And of course, the weather has been terrible - days and nights of solid cloud and pouring rain.
I did manage one night of testing, and managed to manually align the mount to within 1 arc-minute. Which is a great achievement when I’m not certain what the hell I’m doing… And then managed to bugger it up by trying to drive everything via the laptop and Ekos. If I’d simply left it all alone, I could have got some imaging done. Next time…
Before I forget, it’s mid-winter here and the nights get very chilly. I need to get some gloves that will let me drive the mount and use the laptop - frozen fingers are not much fun at all.