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Bird
Post Laureate
Reged: 08/07/03
Posts: 3866
Loc: Murrumbateman, Australia
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There are lots of reports of good results coming up here, so I thought I should balance the books with a report of a complete failure :-)
Tonight promised to be good - clear skies, no wind. I set up at about 10am and headed back indoors to wait for mars to reach maximum altitude at around 2am.
When 2am came around, I lugged out the laptop, connected the camera and fired up my webcam capture software. I noticed that mars was much dimmer than it had been in the last few sessions - I found myself winding up the exposure on the ToUCam to 100% and gain up to 60%. I clearly remember sessions a few days ago where the gain stayed down around 20%.
For some reason mars was very dim tonight. I checked various things, and worried that I might have damaged the camera in some Unspecified Way, since I had dismantled it and done various things to it (like remove the microphone off its circuit board) in preparation to installing the circuit board into a new box. The new box wasnt ready tonight, so I just reassembled the original ToUCam plastic bubble and used that.
Had I damaged something? I couldnt tell, but for some reason mars tonight was a complete waste of time. I got some shots at f/12, but nothing usable at f/24 where I had planned to spend a few Gb of disk space.
Eventually I noticed that there was a reasonably thick fog around, and that explained part of it - a strong inversion was holding down fog and smoke, reducing the transparency.
Serious clouds rolled in at 4am (about 20 mins ago) and put me out of my misery.
When I got the OTA inside, a visual inspection showed the real problem was heavy fog (and ice!!) on the secondary mirror. Obviously I must have left the tube parked with the open focusser pointing up while I was waiting for 2am, and for most of the session the secondary was completely fogged.
Oh well, there's always tomorrow night... err, tonight :-)
Bird, 4.30am
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Deep Sky Optics 16" f/4 composite
Royce 16" conical f/4
Royce 14.5" conical f/5
Deep Sky Optics 13.1" conical f/5.5
PGR Grasshopper Express / Flea3 / Dragonfly Express / Dragonfly2
RedHat Linux + Coriander
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/
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rboe
Reged: 03/16/02
Posts: 63466
Loc: Phx, AZ
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Novel use of ice; neutral density filter. You're a tough Bird not to notice it cold enough to have ice on your optics. 
Thanks for making us Northerns feel better. For a while it seemed like you guys were getting all the good weather.
What kind of laptop to you use, and its' OS?
Ron
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Ron
NS11GPS
Pronto
16" dob
127mm F9 Surplus Shed/Crawmach kit scope
Coronado SolarMax 40 on a Celestron 102 Wide Field
Best of ATM
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Charles
Post Laureate
Reged: 06/12/03
Posts: 4111
Loc: Enterprise, AL
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Glad to see you have a little Alabama weather for a change Bird!
Just teasing, I feel your pain, last night was a wash out and tonight doen't look better. Bummer.
Charles 
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Bird
Post Laureate
Reged: 08/07/03
Posts: 3866
Loc: Murrumbateman, Australia
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Quote:
Novel use of ice; neutral density filter. You're a tough Bird not to notice it cold enough to have ice on your optics.
Thanks for making us Northerns feel better. For a while it seemed like you guys were getting all the good weather.
What kind of laptop to you use, and its' OS?
Ron
lol - yes, the IND (Ice Neutral Density) filter, or maybe the "Frosted Glass Filter".
My wife actually has one of those for special effects on her camera.
The laptop is a Dell inspiron 8500 (2GHz p4, 512Mb RAM, 40Gb HD) and it's running RedHat 9.0. I have vmware installed and run win2k inside that when I need something microsofty, but I try to avoid that :-)
The capture software is qastrocam. I need to modify my copy a bit more, and add the ability to move the gain/exp controls via the keyboard - it's tricky to slide them up a notch when it's subzero and you're on a laptop and wearing gloves :-)
Bird
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Deep Sky Optics 16" f/4 composite
Royce 16" conical f/4
Royce 14.5" conical f/5
Deep Sky Optics 13.1" conical f/5.5
PGR Grasshopper Express / Flea3 / Dragonfly Express / Dragonfly2
RedHat Linux + Coriander
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/
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rboe
Reged: 03/16/02
Posts: 63466
Loc: Phx, AZ
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I've been trying to install qastrocam and along with another package I'm having issues with SuSE not setting the QTDIR shell variable. Setting manually does no good as far as make goes so I'm checking SuSE for patches.
My whole root account is flaky ever since I upgraded to 8.2, think something conflicted somewhere along the line. User account is fine. Maybe I'll give myself god rights and try to build from there. Linux is great but when it goes south it can grow hair on you.
I have this other hard drive; maybe I should do a fresh install on it and see what happens.
Keep us posted
Ron
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Ron
NS11GPS
Pronto
16" dob
127mm F9 Surplus Shed/Crawmach kit scope
Coronado SolarMax 40 on a Celestron 102 Wide Field
Best of ATM
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Charles
Post Laureate
Reged: 06/12/03
Posts: 4111
Loc: Enterprise, AL
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Bertha is out and I shooting Mars. Pictures at 11
Charles
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Charles
Post Laureate
Reged: 06/12/03
Posts: 4111
Loc: Enterprise, AL
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Well, here is a crappy picture at 11. In and out of the thin high clouds. Had to constantly adjust shutter speed to get a halfway descent picture. Maybe tomorrow!
Charles 
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Bird
Post Laureate
Reged: 08/07/03
Posts: 3866
Loc: Murrumbateman, Australia
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Ron - I got burned a while back trying to upgrade between versions of RedHat, and so I never try to do that anymore - the same with Windows stuff as well, always use a fresh install is the best bet.
Mars is out again tonight - the clouds have gone away (for the moment) so it looks like being another late night.
I've got a bit of reassembly to do on The Box before I can use it for real - The ccd is placed a bit off centre with the current arrangement and so that bit has to be rebuilt to correct it.
I definitely need to order a motorized focusser with more carrying capacity than my current one. I wish I could go back in time by about 3 months and I'd have it by now :-)
Hey Charles - that image looks like it has real promise. Do you have the large original around somewhere that I can get it? I'd like to have a go at it in Astra Image.
cheers, Bird
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Deep Sky Optics 16" f/4 composite
Royce 16" conical f/4
Royce 14.5" conical f/5
Deep Sky Optics 13.1" conical f/5.5
PGR Grasshopper Express / Flea3 / Dragonfly Express / Dragonfly2
RedHat Linux + Coriander
http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/
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