Hi Monti:
Yeah, it's going to rain here in White Lake all week also (even though it's sunny out right now). I find that those forecasts can change drastically from day-to-day though. Even with all the hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars of satellites up there and billion dollar weather modelling programs, the weather forecasts are never reliable beyond 40 or so hours. I watched the weather every single day on The Weather Network and on Clear Sky Chart for over one year and that's the conclusion I came to. It used to be just as accurate (sometimes better) when I was a kid and the DJ at the radio station would look at the $100 barometer outside his window and give an accurate 2-day forecast! :)
I'm in the same predicament regarding autoguiding. I recently tweaked the backlash in my mount, greased some things, tightened things up, and lightened the payload a lot, so now all my autoguide parameters will change. It will be like starting all over again.
I haven't done any astronomy for over a year! I've been house-moving and building an observatory. I only got autoguiding going over a year ago but never got the chance to do any really long exposures. So now finally I'm ready to start taking some actual LRGB and narrowband images. However, I'm just going to start off with B&W to get the hang of long exposure stuff.
I'll start off with some B&W luminance images, first using no filter, then using a Baader IR/UV filter. Then I'll try some B&W Ha, and finally some LRGB using some inexpensive Meade RGB interference filters that came with my DSI-II Pro camera. The LRGB will be a chance to learn Photoshop layered post processing. Then will come combined colour Ha, SII, and OIII images. I imagine it will be over a year before I get very far.
Cheers,
- Leonard
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 10:54 AM
Subject: [neximage] Re: NOVICE! Need a Lot of Advice
Hi Leonard,
That was a great post!... You had already explained the basics of autoguiding in previous posts, but this goes farther in that you touch upon the various autoguiding paramaters within the software, such as in Metaguide. That's a great help. Last week, I had three consecutive nights of photography (packing it in at about 3 AM each time). The photo sessions were deep-sky using my Canon 300D at prime focus, and centered on M101 and M51. I had no autoguiding yet. But this week its rainy so I will take the time to set up everything to try autoguiding the next time around. With an exposure time of 60 seconds, I get between 35% and 50% of frames OK. The others show stars like grains of rice. I would like to increase that proportion, and eventually increase the exposure time itself. So maybe the autoguiding will help.
Bye, Monti.
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