Good news and not such good news

[Carole]

I have made great progress over the last couple of weeks.  Leg still needs some strengthening, but I can now walk in the house with no crutches, and have started driving with Consultant's permission, but I still take one crutch when I am walking outside for safety and there are some things I cannot do as yet like kneeling. 

I managed to get into the observatory and had half set up a couple of days ago with the intention of trying out my replacement DSLR on thursday evening.  Suddenly I noticed it was clear this evening, so I had to hurriedly finish off setting up, and realised I didn't have my handset.  Not in any of the cable bags, and can't find it in the cupboard where I stored all my cables which my neighbour kindly derigged for me some 2 months ago.  Can't think where it can be, this is what comes of doing things out of normal routine, must have put it in a "safe place", but can't remember where.

So was forced to use EQMod which I haven't used for a few years, so wasted a lot of time trying to remember how to use it, then it would not connect, tried loads of different COM ports, and in the end went into Device Manager which told me Com port 4 (which I had already tried).  Finally got it working, but all that clear sky had already been wasted.

Then I forgot how difficult it is to "see" your target with a DSLR, Mono CCD cameras are so much easier from that point of view, so no idea whether I have the target in the FOV until I process. 

So tomorrow is "hunt the handset" day and attach the Mono CCD camera as well to a dual rig so I can see what I am doing.

Takes me back to the days when I was learning and everything went wrong with lots of wasted evenings. 
Still at least I managed to get into the obsy if nothing else.

Carole

[MarkS]

Hi Carole,

That's really good news on the leg!

Sorry to hear about the imaging woes

Mark

[Carole]

Thanks Mark. Had another look in daylight this morning, still can't find the handset, even looked in the van as l had planned an astro camp the weekend of my accident. 

In the same pouch that l normally keep it is my Heq5 EQMod cable, so if l don't find it before next astro camp am stuffed for that too. 

Carole

[Carole]

Well more good news and not so good news:

a) Found the handset and cables, mysteriously underneath a pile of stuff hubby was sorting out in a completely different room to where I had stored my cables - absolutely no idea how it got there.

b) I have been trying to stack last night images with DSS, as it's the only programme I have found to stack CR files that I can cope with.  However, first of all despite lowering the star threshold it would only stack 1 file.  So I googled it and upgraded to 3.3.2. then I just got a thin column as a result.  So as a test I tried it with Astroart and got the same result. 
I remember this coming up on a regular basis on forums, so I went onto the DSS forum, where I found lots of people asking the same question, but no replies, so I went onto SGL and they were saying to upgrade to v3.3.4 which is only available as a download from the DSS forum, which then comes in as a RAR file which I can't open.  A trial of Winzip seems to open it, but it doesn't seem to replace the version on the computer.  The good news, is that the temporary 3.3.4 version seems to have stacked the files, but how to I "keep" the 3.3.4 version, all Winzip will do is open it, but it doesn't install. Winzip wants £31 after the trial version expires.

Any ideas folks?

Carole

[Carole]

Think/hope I have sorted DSS 3.3.4, Had to extract it from Winzip and then it seems to put the file elsewhere in the folders, and just dragged it to the desktop. 

Never installed a program like that before, but seems to work. 

Only managed to get 45 minutes of usable data last night, so will have to wait for another evening.

But I am back in the saddle.  Yippee.

Carole