Fantastic, thanks! I was almost certain there had to be an easy way to do this and that I was just too dense to find it. I know now where to look, will test it tonight.
Best
Jo
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Outstanding! Taken from a dark site or from a light polluted area?
I imaged the Rosette, too, about 2 weeks ago, from Bortle 8/9 skies, using a similar sequence.
My image is not nearly as good as yours, but the interesting part about it is that I managed by pure luck to catch the asteroid (6) Hebe as it was passing through the left lower quadrant. You can derive the sequence I used: Ha, O3, S2 from the trail of the asteroid.
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Thanks for you all your great work, Eric!
Tonight it looks like it is going to be clear, so I might have the chance to test the scheduler again. Worked like a charm last time.
One quirk I could not change, but perhaps I did not look in the right place and you or Jasem can help with this:
When using the filter wheel EKOS will always force refocusing when switching filters. That is time consuming and also an issue because some filters are so effective, there is very little light coming through for the focuser to latch onto. As a result, I need to expose for a long time or the focussing solution is not always the optimal one when I use Ha, O3 or S2 and there are no bright stars in the vicinity, like when I try to image M81 or M51. It generally works quite well with the Luminescence filter in the light path.
What I was wondering is, is there a way to switch off the forced refocusing on filter change? It looks to me like my filters are parfocal or close to it. So I would prefer to focus periodically using the Lum filter and then switch directly and without refocusing to the narrowband filters.
Thanks for your suggestions and again, thanks for this great scheduler!
Jo
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Reason I ask is because I am using FCUSB for focusing, not a stepper focuser. There is no way for the system to capture flats at the same focus as light frames, since focuser position would be undefined, as for manual focusing.
I didn’t encounter Antonio’s problem in 3.0.
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3.0.0 works for flats as Jasem shows for me as well. 2.9.8 had a bug. Have not tried the MacOS version, though.
Happy New Year!
Jo
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The advantage of the pole master is that it comes with adapters that really bolt it down in the tunnel and that there is no chance that gravity can move it during mount rotation. Otherwise, any other camera with a lens that encompasses about 5 deg around the NCP should do it.
I'll test that when the weather clears up again.
Bonne chance!
Jo
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That is interesting! Because, thinking back, that's also what I did when I experienced the same problem a couple of months ago.
I first aligned West, got a decent alignment, and then thought I better check it by rotating East. That was not with the polemaster, though, but with my guide scope (which includes the NCP in the image, my imaging scope doesn't).
I wonder whether the problem is not in the PA module, but in the fact that there might be excessive flexure in my setup, which, of course, would double the deviation when aligning on the other side of pier.
Along the same lines, I aligned using the PA module and my guide scope last night (but only to the West) and got field rotation with 5 min exposures, although the alignment was as perfect as it gets (13"). That has never happened to me before when I aligned using the polar scope.
The good news is, the polemaster should get rid of that problem for you, provided you mount it in the polar scope tunnel, i.e. aligned with the rotational axis of the scope and without a possibility of flexure.
(The Zip tie rig you showed earlier probably won't fulfil this criterion).
Thanks for opening this thread, I may well have found out why I had the identical problem.
The problem that follows, provided I am correct, is that your 3' alignment may still result in excessive star trailing, because, well, it's not a 3' misalignment, but more like 29' misalignment (~58'/2).
Any mistake in that logic, please let me know! Clear nights are too precious to waste.
Merry X-mas!
Jo
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