I've been stuck for about 6 months in the quagmire that is upgrading multiple pieces of hardware at once. But I finally got everything cobbled together enough to capture this image. "Adventures" include:
- Upgraded to a Mesu mount MKII (yay!)
- Had to modify my "observatory" (read: shed) since the mount is larger than my CGX
- Needed to order and custom machine a new counterweight bar since the Mesu one was precisely 0.5” too long
- Had to order new counterweights due to the thickness of the Mesu counterweight bar
- Bought an amazing SBIG 16803 “ultimate” package from @Omar Radwan (yay!)
- Ordered adapters from precise parts to make this fit onto my Stellarvue SVX-102T
- Realized the added weight of the new camera required modification to all the gear I had on the scope (computer, wifi power control, power bricks, etc.) so had to tear it all down and reassemble
- Discovered that there are very, very few session planning & control software packages that a) play nicely with SBIG cameras and b) also play nicely with SiTech servos while c) preserving the features of APT+PhD2 that I’ve loved.
- Shelled out for both MaxIm DL and Voyager, as those were the closest I could get to overcoming the issues from the previous point.
- Had to learn MaxIm DL, Voyager, and SiTechexe (the latter of which has over 350 pages of documentation; not intimidating at all! /s)
- Couldn’t for the life of me figure out the difference between the on-sensor chip (which was well out of the imaging circle) and the OAG, as they had identical resolutions. Turns out, the OAG had been misassembled, so had fallen to the other side of the unit.
- Fixed the OAG (only required 2 trips to Home Depot and manually sheering a couple of screws which were too short to get the pickoff mirror in the imaging circle and in focus; SBIG uses amazing lock-tite apparently).
- Finally got everything together aaaaannd, turns out my Dec axis is either slipping or misconfigured, which took a while of back and forth to identify what was causing the issue (due to so many things being changed). Have yet to fix that. Thankfully, the Mesu mount works just fine tracking even if slewing isn’t up to par yet.
- And of course, met with the cloudiest Jan-May central PA has seen in a while.
In spite of all that, here we have the first light of this new setup! An amazingly detailed, wide-field view of the crescent nebula with only approximately 3 hours of exposure time! Importantly, this is completely uncalibrated: with all of the above, I’ve had no time for flats, darks, or biases. Heck, I haven’t even figured out how to get MaxIm DL to play nice with my Focus Lynx focuser, so this is manually eyeballed for focus.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that the scope only has a quoted imaging circle of 43mm (as confirmed by Vic Maris), while the diagonal of the SBIG 16803 is >52mm? Take a look at the aberration images in the revisions. Safe to say, the Stellarvue performed well beyond expectations! The SBIG also is quite impressive: basically zero sensor tilt even with such a large, medium format sensor. I hadn’t previously been able to get this much OIII to come through, so I definitely am pleased.And yes, my pixel scale is way, way under-sampling. But if drizzle was good enough for Hubble, it’s good enough for me (that, and I have really bad seeing here quite often, and am drawn towards wide field imaging anyways).So the saga isn’t over, but looks to be going in a great direction!
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