So I had another fun night with my GM811G.
I wanted to try something out, and it turned into a lot of things over the night.
Like 1300 things. Like 13,000 seconds. Like 3.6111 hours. Like both unguided, and guided. And like "What Meridian?"
I decided to do 10 second exposures. The goal was to amass a lot of data, to let it build, so I could see an end result out at the end.
And in doing this long run, I could get something visual of the mounts behavior in a real world example. Not a graph, not a stat, but an image.
As I looked at the Southern Meridian in Stellarium I thought about Scott Losmandy, and his words about the RAEXT, which I got for the break down advantages, since I mule my mount out and back in most every night.
But I wanted to see if it could actually go through a meridian, and how far?
How far became a matter of how long, and of the Limit designed into the mount. Which I had set to my worst case scenario so my camera could never hit the mount. I reset the limit twice on the fly. And when I reached the point my object was about to disappear behind my roof, the beeping warning told me I was yet again reaching the limit. Just as I was calling it a night, at 13,000 seconds of images.
Sorry, nothing to complain about here. But maybe you'd like to see what 13,000 seconds of image looks like, 1300 individual images, 10 second exposures each image.
No Post processing, only a crop. Only filter was a Badder Moon and Sky Glow light pollution. I set the color adjust to a set point, and no Auto Adjust used.
1300th image, saved in TIF format, Guided in Pixels with PHD2. 13,000 seconds of stacked data. Unprocessed, but converted to jpg to crop.
I did screw up the first handful of my images. I forgot to start PHD2, so I had 10-15 unguided images in the beginning.
I thought about Brian and his unguided trials. And since the image being built looked ok to me, I just started PHD 2 and let things roll. I didn't start over.
Something I liked was how over the hours, the tiny distant stars began to emerge from the ink of deep space. Also how details emerged from the Lagoon Nebula itself.
And I think Meridian flips may have become something I can pretty much forget about.
Only watch for the limits and how physically close the moving elements are getting to the fixed elements of my mount.
I think this is a testimony to how great a Losmandy Mount can perform. I bought it for a lot of reasons, but imaging was my biggest one.
Tonight I hope to chose another object, and follow it as? the Earth's rotation carries it from my Eastward, through my Westward, Field of View.
I am having fun now. Attached is a copy of the original, and you are most welcome to play with it if you'd like.
I cropped away the edge artifact to present the above image. If someone could advise me how to improve the original as taken, like to get rid of that edge frame anomaly, I'm all ears.
Thanks for looking.
--
SonnyE
(I suggest viewed in full screen)
