FINALLY!!! Some imaging done...

This season has been a real nightmare for BBubble Observatory!! As written earlier my Mesu2 broke and after that my FLI PDF focuser failed...

They finally respond to my emails from FLI and requested focuser to be sent back there for repair. Just to send it there would have cost me almost 200€... And basically, the problem was that the motor drive sprocket was loose. So I respond the email and requested help for opening the focuser at home and tightening the drive sprocket, No one from the FLI responded me anymore... So nothing good for me to say on that company!!

So finally I decided to open the focuser despite the warning not to do so in the manual! The whole operation took me about an hour. And the most time I spend was adjusting the focuser to be straight before attaching everything.

So earlier this week there was also a good weather with no moon. First few hours of collimation and then taking images. Imaged three different targets with RGB-filters and managed to collect about 60 min per channel per target.

I Sat down yesterday to process them. All channels was looking pretty good after calibration and then I started to combine them to color images. But what the hell, all stars are white... As well as the nebulosity in the NGC1579, WTF!!!!

Ok, first impression: all different images were taken in the same filter. So is my filter wheel now broken or what!?! During imaging session the filters were changing in the MaximDL and all was ok when I tested the drives after re-installing my PC after its hard drive crash few month ago.

I went inside the observatory and changed the filter from the MaximDL and nothing happened except in the MaximDL camera view, great... I re-powered the camera and noticed that the wheel was testing itself normally, so at least it was not broken!! Started the CCDOPS and tested the filter wheel, all working perfectly! So it must be the MaximDL... Checked filter wheel options, I had selected "CFW-8" because I have 8-slot filter wheel. Selected "standard" and the wheel started to move as it should.

Luckily all the images was taken in the L-filter so now I'm missing only RGB-data!! So here's what I get in the L-Channel:

NGC3184:

NGC2419, The Galactic Wanderer

NGC1579, The Northern Trifid,