Neil Wyatt

Snatched from the Jaws of Failure

Posted July 4, 2019 by Neil Wyatt

Last night I discovered my guiding disaster at Rosliston was because my laptop woudln’t work with my camera any more. Sorted today by removing and reinstalling the ZWO drivers.

For last night, I had to spend nearly an hour getting my Touptec Mono to guide for me.

Then this morning, really struggled to process my data, in the end I found putting the autosave.tiff file into Astra Image worked. 1hr 35 minutes of 5-minute subs, 130P-DS, 450D, modded and cooled. HEQ5, guided.

NAN at Rosliston 28 June 2019

Posted June 30, 2019 by Neil Wyatt

I couldn’t get my guidescope to focus after Fridays (fascinating) RAG meeting, so my plan to do Ha on the North America Nebula flopped.

I did managed to get some semi-widefield subs of the NAN with my 135mm lens and the 1000D. For some reason the focus drifted off over the first hour until the stars turned into circles, but I caught it in time and got about 130 stackable 30-second subs.

Jupiter 20-21 June 2019

Posted June 21, 2019 by Neil Wyatt

I did 33 runs on Jupiter last night. The Red spot was well paced, as was Io transiting the planet, but although it’s shadow is clear there is only a hint of the moon.

My ADC made a huge difference.This was with the ZWO ASI120MC, x3 barlow and 150PL.

For this session, wavelets worked better than deconvolution giving a smoother result.

Two Years on M13

Posted May 27, 2019 by Neil Wyatt

While listening to the election results last night I had a go a t combining my M13 data from last week (2 minute subs) with my June 2018 data (30 second subs). On average the June data wasn’t quite as high scoring because of the shorter exposures, but I was ruthless in getting rid of poor scoring frames from May (I’d already culled last year’s data). The combination seems to have been effective in keeping detail right to the middle of the cluster.