External Power challenge. Twice now I've put the Vespera 2 out for a planned session during the night and in the morning found the power cable to the USB-C connector wrapped tightly around the base. Seems pretty obvious that it struggled to initialize and I attribute that to greater number of clouds than I expected. It was not successful initializing. It appears the V2 keeps looking for clear skies by rotating further in the same clockwise direction. I tried using a long cable and loosely wrapping in around the tripod so that it would not be in conflict. Even doing that didn't prevent it from making my guess is maybe 5 full clockwise rotations or more. The skies here have been highly variable lately and much clouds at times. I use Atmospheric and Clear Outside apps to predict when skies should be clear. Most of the time that has worked well for me. For the first time, I'm somewhat wishing I had purchased the Pro model with the much larger battery. Anyone else experienced this challenge or even better solved how to deal with it? Thanks.
M16-Eagle Nebula. Three multi-night sessions. 4 hours integration, 1630 10-sec. images. Dual Band filter. Developed in PixInsight, Photoshop and a little in Lightroom Classic. The blue in the center is somewhat false, but my attempt to bring out colors I see in images in AstroBin. Needs more work!
An obvious solution is to use velcro and attach the battery to the scope’s body. Many people tried and it seems to work just fine. Assuming the battery is not super big/heavy.
I also use the scope overnight but I never have any issues. This is what I do:
1) initialize the scope ‘manually’ under supervision.
2) see what area of the sky is clear (or make sure the area that I want is clear)
3) start the plan. The scope will wait for the target start time. Usually I leave about 5 mins till the plan needs to start so I am basically waiting for 5 mins or so.
4) once the plan starts I go to sleep
5) I am not greedy and not trying to aim at many targets in any given night. Plus I like to use CLS or DB filters and you cannot mix them in 1 plan/night. So I pick usually 2 targets (with same filter requirements). When the scope needs to point to the 2nd target it can freely do that even with a short cable. Occasionally I will pick 3 targets.
6) I like to finish the plan no pater than 4:30 am because after that the heavy dew comes. Plus sky starts to brighten. If I start at 10:30 pm and end at 4:30 am it gives me 6h. Or 2-3h per target. Given that some frames will be bad (clouds, planes) I usually end up with 1h30m of exposure per target per night. If I go for more targets then I will mot get enough exposure.
If you get VPro with a tiny pixels, it will require even longer exposures to get some signal so you will not be able to aim at many targets each night. Just initialize the scope before starting the plan!
Edited by BrickInTheSky, 27 June 2025 - 09:43 AM.