Aug 15

NGC 7822

After my polar scope disaster and recovery I captured NGC 7822 last night to check if everything works fine again. It was a very warm night. More than 20°C even at the end of the session… ​​​​​​​Drizzled 2x and resized to original resolution. Details

Aug 15

Polar Scope Calibration

Yesterday afternoon I aligned the polar scope reticle in vertical and horizontal direction towards a distant buidling because the night before I suspected that it’s not aligned well anymore. I was right! I’m not sure if this is my mistake. Before that all started, I transported the mount with attached counter weights from my balcony […]

Aug 14

Caldwell 9 – Cave Nebula

Still not happy with DEC performance, but at least I can setup the mount in the darkness without light now 🙂 This image contains only 75% of the lights… On the other 25% there are clouds or DEC error 🙁 Details

Aug 12

Bubble Nebula Wide Field

Again testing the gear mesh adjustment… and I’m still not done 🙁 So far I adjusted the gear meshing 4 times in the range of 1/8 turn counter clockwise and 1/8 turn clockwise, since the manual says not more than 1/4 turn in total. I contacted iOptron again regarding this issue and they told me […]

Aug 11

NGC281 Pacman Nebula

I still looking for the ideal adjustment for gear meshing… this time around 15% useless subs. The other subs resulted in this image: Details

Aug 10

Persei Cluster

The next few days looks promising regarding weather, so I can continue with my gear mesh tests. I begin to record every session with the MGEN since it’s very valuable for finding reasons for tracking errors. I’m still using NGC7789 as test target, simply to have similar data to compare. At midnight I switched to […]

Aug 1

GEM28 – Gear Mesh Adjustment

Update Sept. 25, 2021 Since the last gear meshing adjustment degraded the performance of my GEM28, especially for RA, I adjusted it again and recorded the whole process: iOptron GEM28 manual (Appendix C, page 36): https://www.ioptron.com/v/Manuals/G28_GEM28_Manual.pdf I’m still not sure what to read out from the MGEN curves… On the MGEN graph it’s visible that […]

Jul 29

Battery Replacement

I purchased my first 17Ah SkyWatcher PowerTank right after my first telescope in 2015. Because I didn’t care much about it (I didn’t reloaded it after every use!) the battery died very quickly. So I buyed a second one in 2016. The second power tank I use until today (huge difference in lifespan, if you […]

Jul 24

Astronomik UV-IR block filter

Recently I expanded my ultra-small filter collection (so far only the CLS-CCD filter) with the Astronomik UV-IR block L-2 and L-3 filter. The CLS-CCD (City Light Suppression) filter blocks light pollution wavelengths and consequently also colors in that range. The CLS-CCD filter blocks up to 450 nm, between 520 and 620 nm and from 690 […]

Jul 22

Caroline’s Rose Cluster

Since it’s almost Full Moon I decided to capture a star cluster to continue testing my new mount. This time with 90 seconds exposure time, like on the Star Adventurer. A slight DEC error was present on 4 of 48 subs… The interesting fact is that the error appears in a 10 minute interval = […]