After more than an hour of trying many camera/mount choices and after plugging and unplugging most cables and after running a cable from the guide camera directly to the scope guide port PHD2 is again making mount connections. Changed so many things I don’t know what corrected the problem. For the record, camera selection was “ASI Camera (1) (ASCOM) and mount selection was Meade Generic (ASCOM). Which I think I was using to start with.
Anyway, with the full moon and with it getting late I slewed to M44.
- M44s.jpg (1.2 MiB) Viewed 5013 times
22 Apr 2024 20:12 – 22:24 EDT
47 X 1 min, unbinned, -15°C cooling, 200 gain, 1 Hz guide rate
Explore Scientific 102mm refractor with LP filter and ASI2600MC-P camera
18 of 72 frames were discarded as apparently, I’d reset all guide settings and midway through the imaging session PHD started making major corrections to declination. Proper setting to south correction only fixed this.
Conclusions & lessons learned:
The whole guiding problem may have simply been a dirty connection. Will disconnect camera running from guide camera guide port to scope guide port and hopefully confirm that I’m running on ASCOM once again.
Processing a star field can be an interesting from an aesthetics point of view. To achieve pinpoint stars one loses the fainter stars. So for prints there’s a trade-off as standing back from an 8 ½ X 11 print if stars aren’t big enough you don’t even see them.
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The Beehive is an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. At 610 light-years distance, it’s one of the nearest open clusters to Earth, it contains a larger population of stars than other nearby bright open clusters holding around 1,000 stars. Under dark skies, the Beehive Cluster looks like a small nebulous object to the naked eye, and has been known since ancient times.
