Weekend Antics - Part 2

Saturday would be the day I would get everything sorted out and get some awesome images after Friday's fail.

I had been thinking about sorting out my power supply issues for some time as well and had been looking at getting a deep cycle marine battery to provide power to all the kit including the Asus EEEPC Netbook that controls everything. The couple of jump starter pack I have been using work fine for the other scopes for a couple nights worth of power but with all the current sucking off them from the imaging rig and the inability to charge the netbook they where not really up to the task or a long nights imaging. After looking at different batteries and chargers I wasn't too happy with what was around locally and I could easily get a better setup online but I wanted to use it for tonight!

I gave up on the battery idea altogether and instead jumped in with both feet and handed over a small fortune for a Honda Generator.. I got the Honda EU 10i which is a nice compact unit that can chuck out a 1,000 watts of juice which is heaps to run everything I need and them some. The unit has the normal AC output and a 12V DC battery charge output as well so you can in practice use it to charge batteries in the day and them use those during the evening with out the generator noise. This would normally be the way to go but this unit can run on a 'eco' mode which slows the motor down enough for the current that is being drawn and it is super quite at around only 80db. A major plus of this unit is the inbuilt computer controlled inverter which gives a real nice clean current and with the 240-12v lab supply I have the power to the gear will be nice and clean. On Eco mode the unit will run for 8hrs on just one tank of a couple liters fuel supposedly, I haven't tested this yet. They filled it up with oil and fuel at the shop and told me to run it off eco mode for the first 10hours of use. I tried charging up the Laptop Saturday night when it got flat but the Generator died after only 2 hours of use! this was not right and I know that with out eco mode on it would be quite a bit shorter run time but not that short, I'm thinking that the fill up at the shop wasn't exactly a full tank of juice and I haven't tested it again to see how it runs with a full tank but I presume it will be better, we shall see.

Headed out to Chapman Valley lookout on dusk so I could try and sort out the OAG in the daylight. I tinkered around with the extensions ect and then setup all the gear. Had the same problems as of Friday night in not being able to get the guider ccd to achieve focus. The wind was a bit strong but I knew that it was going to drop later on so I wasn't too worried about that. After hours of tearing my hair out and not getting a satisfying result the penny dropped, have I been going about the hole focus thing the wrong way around? focus the guider then then the imager? worth a shot, boom! focus. The excitement was short lived tho as the I lappy which had gotten very low was getting charged with the Generator had spluttered to death and the wind was starting to get annoying again. With only a hour or so left on the netbook I tinkered around with the guiding and manged to get a couple of 10min subs! this made it all worth while. After this the laptop was almost dead and the generator empty so I packed up the scope and put the  gear away and decided to put a DSLR on the mount and do some wide field shots, bad idea, the wind blew up with vengeance and killed any chance of that happening.

The couple of 10mins subs that I took were not really usable as I had the CCD cooler turned off and the noise and banding was horrid in the shots.