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,

Update for season 2014-2015

There has been quiet times in the BBubble observatory... So here's a short review of what has happened!


Let's go back to August! Darkness was arriving after the Summer and I put everything ready; focuser, camera, mount control box and so on. Powered everyhting up and suddenly the mount started to move in RA-axis faster than it has ever done before (because of the 1,5m scope I've limited the slew speed to 5 deg/sec)... WTF!!!!!!! Ok, power off to prevent any damages. Checked the cabling and tried again with the same result, great.....


Contacted the mount's manufacturer who wanted me to sent the mount so he can fix it. We agreed that I would try to find the failed part because it would be much easier to send and fix that than the whole mount. After dozens of emails and measurements with oscilloscope we find the broken RA-axis encoder. Another part which "has never failed before"...


Manufacturer promised to send me a new one after he gets it. After a week he mailed that the one he got has a broken cover. So we agreed that I'll send mine and he switches that cover to the broken one. And finally after 1,5 months I got my Mesu2 working again. And then the clouds came...


Ok, normal Finnish winter. More than 2 months of cloudiness. Finally some clear skies in December so I could make another polar alignment to my mount (I accidently moved the mount during repair). Done!!


Then collimation and check the straighness of the optical path, Done with less than 1" error. And then more clouds...


Few days later I wondered that my computer in the observatory was offline. The hard disc drive has failed... Ok, easy to change and lost only 30hrs of calibration data. But needed to install every driver again.


In the middle of Janury few moments of clear skies again. Vcurves for the Focusmax and adjusting autoguider settings in the MaximDL.


Next night perfect weather with 0% moon. Started all remotely to and watched how CCDCommander begun its script. Everything connected, dome slaved, mount slewed to focus star, plate solve and recenter and then focus run. Started ok but then reported that on the "wrong side of V-curve"... Focuser reported to be near Home-position when I stopped the script. Moved focuser back to starting position and took a few second image. WTF!!!


There was only donuts in the screen, no stars... Great!! Later that night I drove to the observatory an found my PDF focuser jammed to its outmost position. Closed everything and went to sleep.


So now I'm waiting istructions from the FLI how to repair the PDF. There's propably only a loose screw in the motor drive sprocket but the focuser needs to be opened to tighten it.

14" Newtonian

This was about a year long project from first orders to first light!

So here's my "home build" 14" Newtonian inside the observatory. There's not too much extra room but it fits in perfectly.

This is combination of parts from several manufacturer's and a home made carbon fiber tube.

Here's some specifications:
Primary mirror:                  Oldham Optical, 14" (355mm) with PV 1/10λ and strehl 0.97
Secondary mirror:              Oldham Optical, 4.7" (120mm) 
Focal ratio:                        f/4.8 (focal length 1700mm)
Primary mirror cell:            Orion Optics U.K
Secondary spider:               Protostar, 4-vane heavy-duty with anti-dew heater
Focuser:                            Orion Optics U.K, 3" Crayford with 10:1 reduction (+RoboFocus)
Field corrector:                  Orion Optics U.K, 3" CFF (corrected field flattener)
Tube inside diameter:         400mm
Tube length:                       about 1600mm
Weight:                             about 30kg (without camera)

And here's a detailed picture of the camera. As you can see I didn't pay too much of attention for finalizing the tube. And I needed to add a steel plate (~3kg) under the Robofocus to balance it better (to fit it inside the observatory). The adhesive tape is used only for blocking the possible scattered light. Sbig RGH (remote guide head) is used for guiding.

Maintenance break

So, after few emails to Australia and some testing the Argonavis controller have to be sent back to factory for repair. And this means several weeks delay for this season.

I have to say that I'm quite pissed but no can do! This happens with electronics every now and then.

And a major set back, again...

This hobby really isn't the easiest one... Everything was working well and my new scope looked really well so something happened to my mount's Argonavis controller.

Few weeks ago I noticed that the LCD went really dim and almost unreadable during night. I changed the "RTC" battery because it seemed to had run flat, I got it working again and powered everything down for almost two weeks because of my business trip. Yesterday when I powered it up again  there was nothing in the LCD. So there was no chance to align the mount or to do anything else with it. GREAT!!!!!

I contacted the Wildcard Innovations and made some tests they suggested, and there seems to be problem with the RTC battery voltage input. Without the 3V voltage the operating system of the unit does not start at all....

So there could be a long delay coming for BBubble Observatory.

New season new tricks

Yesterday was a partly clear night after a few weeks of clouds and rain so I made some adjustments of my new imaging scope. More of it later!!

But here's some CCDInspector information of it:

Collimation needs some work but the rest is starting to look quite ok.

I took also few unguided test images of Mizar: This is 5*30sec unbinned and uncalibrated image.

Adjusting the guider settings

The moon is starting to affect on imaging so I used about an hour to adjust the autoguider settings.

First I used 3 sec unbinned exposures and wondered how the tracking error was about 0.6 to 0.8 pixels. Then I realized that one noisy pixel on the edge of the guide star made the difference. After that I changed to 8 sec exposures and noticed that the error graph changed dramatically with lower noise (or with better SNR). After some fine adjustments of the guider aggressiveness I got the unbinned guider error below 0.5 pixels which is enough for my setup (STL pixel size vs. internal guide chip pixel size).

Finally I changed 2*2 binning to the guider and started to use 5-6 sec exposures and got tracking error to about 0.2 pixels.

This kind of graph I've never seen on my previous EQ-5/6 mounts... So no worries of the mounts performance for this small scope!!

Minor progress

Weather has been really awful! During last month there has been two nights with clear sky for longer than 15 minutes.

First one I got the mount polar aligned. I used PAM (polealignmax) which is really easy, fast and precise way to do it. After four runs I had error less than 1 arcsec.

But I noticed that the virtual COM-ports are not so handy to use! When I needed to switch mount control from PAM to MaximDL, I'd had to shut down both programs before I could use the other one. If I tried to disconnect one and connect to another there was an error with the driver. weird...

Last night was the second clear night, but there was a huge storm which cut down the electricity for my observatory too...

Driver update

The weather forecast showed partly cloudy for yesterday evening so I head to the observatory.

I saw stars for about 5 minutes wich after started to snow... So much for my plans for the precise polar alignment!

But, something good because of the clouds! I removed all the hidden COM-ports of my laptop and got the ASCOM-driver working! That's really good news because now I can let the computer do all the hard work of the polar alignment and all that I have to do is rotate the adjustment knobs. And now I don't have to use TheSkyX Pro as a mount control and a planetarium program for the CCDCommander (it's quite heavy for my old observatory computer) because I can do them with the ASCOM. Hopefully weather will get better soon...

First power-up of the mount

My work was keeping me busy and I was away for over 3 weeks. But at this week I had time to power up the mount.

First the bad things: I can't put the dovetail plate holder directly to the mount! There are few skrews which are higher than the underside of the plate holder (they will jam the motion!). I had to lift the dovetail plate holder for about 3mm to prevent it attaching to the skrews.

Ok, this should be figured out when making the mount but this really isn't a big disaster!! I put thick 10mm washers under every locking skrew and that's it!

After figuring that out I put my 80mm APM to the mount and made a rough polar alignment. Then I took some time for visual observing.

I had plans to make precise polar alignment also but I had problems with ASCOM drivers on my laptop. StellarCAT is using virtual COM-ports with USB connection and for some reason my laptop didn't connect to the mount. Everything worked fine with TheSkyX Pro and servocat drivers so no need to worry! But I couldn't use Polealignmax. Hopefully ASCOM drivers will work on my observatory PC.

Mount on pier

Today I had time to place mount on my pier! Job was easier than I thought, I had to make one hole with threads for 8mm skrew. Took about 10 minutes...

The mount is huge comparing to my previous EQ-6. Counterweight bar's diameter is 40mm...

MesuMount2

After over 4 months of waiting I finally got it! Brand new MesuMount2.

The mount is friction driven by stellarcat servomotors and should carry weights up to 100kg. Periodic error should be less than 4 arcsec (peak to peak).

I'll write more when I get first real tests done!

Update

Still waiting for the mount... It's few weeks late now and the manufacturer is expecting some more delay. Hopefully not for too long!

Observatory v2.0

Here's really short update of what have happened since last summer: I decided to make dome as a  "real" dome, not a roll of roof...

So I started to make a Geodesic dome. I made two models, pentagon and hexagon. (here's good calculator: DesertDomes)

These were used as a mold for fiberglass parts. Here's an assembly diagram where you can find these pentagon and hexagon figures:

After making 5 pentagons and 12 hexagons I started to attach them.

And finally a complete dome

And next the shutter system:

And finally:

Here's domes rotation and shutter control box: (lesvedome)

As you can see, I'm not an electrician.... But it's working!!

Electrical and communication box

I finished this few weeks ago and I kinda forgot it. Plan was to make a DIY -type box which encases every "sensitive" parts of the observatory. I decided to isolate that to make sure that temperature inside the box would remain above 0°C. I didn't put there any heater because I thought that two electrical inverters (220V to 12V) would do the trick. I made it quite wide to ensure that everything would have enough room, so the final size was 50:50:40cm.

Lower part includes electronic equipment. Bigger inverter (silver one) is Meanwell's and provides 12V and 150W which actually is more than enough for my equipment (I calculated about 9A), but I had older 5A inverter which I put also inside to feed power to dew-heater. There is also two transformers which provides 5V to Icron's 4-port USB Ranger and an active USB-hub.

And in the upper part is mainly "communications". From the left: USB Ranger, QHY9 power supply (front), wireless gamepad's receiver (black lying above wires), 2-port USB to RS-232 (just right of QHY) and the USB hub.

There's a lot of wires going to the walls behind and beside the USB-hub. They are part of 12V system which I made. I wanted to put most valuable things behind a separate fuses, and the cheapest and easiest way was to use a electrical box of a boat (cost about 20€). That also allows me to use everything separately by selecting equipment which will be powered. This was very useful when I had that motor problem in the mount. I could disable the power input to the mount just by using switch.

There are fuses and power switches to the mount, to both cameras and to QHY's filter wheel (which relays the power to RoboFocus).

And the isolation of the box works perfectly! Picture is taken with phone so it's really awful... But the temperature inside is +5.3°C even though there was almost -25 outside.

My observatory: Third step, polar alignment

I made rough polar alignment with mounts own polar alignment scope. Then I used a free software called "pole align max" or PAM. It sure made things easy!

Basically the computer moves the scope and takes pictures and then tells you where to turn the mount. After 3 runs my polar alignment error was less than 2 arcsec.

Here's my whole setup doing polar alignment. Main camera is QHY9 with QHY's color filter wheel and Astronomik's filters (LRGBHa). I use my old Atik314e as a guider.

My observatory: Second step, structure

The walls came up quite fast because they were made of big plates of plywood. The roof also was easier to built than I thought it would be... The hardest thing was probably to lift it up.

Moving parts of the roof are from sliding doors. Both sides over the wall are u-type metal bars and under the roof are the rollers. The roof can be opened by one hand.

Here is my mount (EQ-6 SynTrek) with my bigger scope, 8" SCT.

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My observatory: First step, base of the mount

I started to plan fixed observing site last winter because I got tired of carrying things outside and back in. It happened more than ten times that I carry everything to my backyard and built them up and then when it was time to put power on the clouds came in and covered the sky. And the next thing to do was carry everything back in to the storage.

I started to plan this "observatory" at summer and soon decided to make it with roll-off roof. I also wanted to keep up the possibility to remove it during summer times. So the only permanent structure was going to be the base of the mount.

And finally at the end of September I started this project. Here is the base of the mount! 1 meter long tube with 55cm diameter dug in the ground and filled with concrete. (upper steel plate is there just to keep those 18mm metal bars straight...)