Tonight, again promises to be a beautiful clear night with sunset at 19:02 and moonrise at 21:20. Moon illumination will 86% with the lows in the lower 50s.  I hope to get an hour of deep sky imaging during with no moon light.  My intended target is the Andromeda Galaxy.  I’m hoping to start with something relatively easy.  I will then switch to the Moon and get some more shots

I spent a good portion of the afternoon looking at how to accomplish a good alignment.  I ran through SynScan two- and three-star alignment, I have to put Jupiter in the mix due to the tree line, west is out of the question, north is out of the question.  That leaves east and south.  Not much in the way of options due to tree lines in those directions either until later in the evening.  So, the plan is to rough polar align, then do a one-star alignment on Jupiter.  Then sync using Astrophotography Tool (APT) and All Sky Plate Solver (ASPS); I just finished confirming that was working.  Now I just need to work on focusing.  The plan is to use Jupiter in Live View to get a rough focus, that should be well enough to plate solve coordinates to sync the mount, then switch to the Bahtinov mask to fine tune the focus with long exposures.  Once I’ve got focus accomplished, I’ll move to my intended target of Andromeda and we’ll see what we see.

Equipment being used tonight will be the Canon, the Optolong L-Pro, and the .85 reducer/flattener for Andromeda.  Setup started at 16:50, finished at 17:15. 

The night started out relatively decent, I aligned to Jupiter with no problems.  Then I went to connect the camera, it wouldn’t turn on.  Got that fixed and then all there was in the live focus was round blob that wouldn’t change when I tried to focus on it.  Discovered I had tightened the set screw on the focus tube but not before I knocked the alignment out and not before I had taken the entire image train apart.  I reinserted the diagonal with reticle and performed another alignment, again that much went smoothly.  The mount tracked Jupiter perfectly.  I did learn how to focus with the Bahtinov mask using Jupiter to provide the refraction spikes.  Once I had gotten a good focus, I took off the mask and snapped an image, however it wouldn’t blind solve.  I know what that problem was though, I’m pretty sure ASPS didn’t have the data loaded for the mm of the OTA, a simple fix once I was back in the office.  I tracked to Saturn and it was in the FOV but not quite, however, tracking was solid.  I was going to turn the night into observation session only but I didn’t have the hand set connected.  Once I connected that, the scope went off into la la land for tracking, unlike the night before.  Completely frustrated, I called it and came in.  Now to add insult to injury I find some kind of white spec on my Barlow, needless to say, this one isn’t going on The Sky Watchers

Again though the night wasn‘t a compete loss, I did learn how to focus using the Bahtinov mask.  And I know that I can get APT to sync the mount once I can get it to plate solve with the camera and the field flattener combined.  That is my focus for the rest of the evening.

Clear Skies!