But unfortunately tonight I was neither...
I started the evening wanting to try out FocusMax and see how it well it would work with my JMI Smartfocus. I pointed the scope and camera at Procyon to test out FWHM Monitor and FocusMax. The bright spot of the evening is that both worked and worked well.
Part way through the testing I slewed the camera back to the start and the mount flipped! I didn't realize it was so close to the meridian. This was the first of many quirky tribulations for the night. I resighted in on Procyon (the mount doesn't handle crossing the meridian that well -- fouls up its pointing a bit) and started over. For some reason I decided to abandon my original plan and try out PoleAlignMax and PemPro for a bit. I moved the mount away from Procyon to Regulus so I would not risk another flip/slew across the meridian for a while.
PoleAlignMax did not play well with CCDSoft -- it only waits 20 seconds on the picture but for some reason always redownloads the autodark processing -- and it wouldn't let me turn off the autodark setting in CCDSoft. Hmm -- I'll have to email the developers about that -- seems strange since FocusMax works quite well with CCDSoft. So I switched to MaximDL to see if I could get a Polar alignment reading. With MaximDL it would not let me turn autodark processing on! Oh well -- a few more attempts convinced me that I still have backlash issues on the declination axis. I could not get a consistent polar alignment reading. I'll keep at it, I'm sure most of it is operator error.
Next I decided to take a break from software and just image for a bit -- I took some shots of M96 -- none of them that great -- and decided I wanted to tackle the mount's periodic error with PemPro.
I slewed back to Regulus and fired up PemPro -- Oops! Since I joined my laptop to our domain, my user id was no longer a local account and PemPro decided my evaluation period was over. Well, I was planning to purchase it anyway so out came the credit card and you guessed it -- the equipment junkie had another new toy.
So when I purchased PemPro I found out there was a new version -- 1.7 so I downloaded it and tried it out. Arrggghhh! Now it keeps losing the star from the track box!! I checked the mount and other settings and couldn't figure it out. So on a sudden inspiration, I backed out the 1.7 version and reinstalled the older 1.6 version.
I had to reboot my laptop and the when I tried to connect back up to the camera CCDSoft wouldn't find it -- nor would MaximDL!! Huh?!? A little poking around and I realize my laptop has associated with the wrong wireless network -- the camera was on the other one. So I switch back to the main network and... Yippee! it works! (I later posted on the CCDWare support forums about this and Ray Gralak quickly found and fixed the bug -- Thanks Ray!!).
Ok, enough software games, I want to take some pictures. Slew the scope over to M13 and start imaging. I'm going to shoot a color sequence of about 50 pictures to stack.
Uh Oh -- the older laptop that is acting as the camera server has automatically downloaded and installed windows updates -- and it want to reboot! Grrr.. Well nothing to do but restart the session. I decide to take BW images instead this time -- 200 x 15 seconds each. I get the run started and then I notice the title bar of the images window does not have a filename on it -- Oh No -- Somehow in fiddling around with the other software, CCDSofts autosave got turned off -- I'm taking lots of images and not saving a single picture to disk! Ouch!
Oh well, by this time it is really early in the morning so I decided to call it a night and turn in. Better luck next time!
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