Free hour on 20" RC in New Mexico

[Daniel]

Hi All, just giving everyone a heads up that Lightbuckets.com are giving away a free hour on a 20" scope in New Mexico, you just have to sign up on there website then apply for the free hour.

I've booked my hour to image Thors Helmet

Details can be found here :-

http://www.lightbuckets.com/newsarticle/22/free-telescope-time--test-drive-lightbuckets-today/

Daniel
:O)

[Rocket Pooch]

Thanks Daniel for that my request got approved!

[Daniel]

I got my approval earlier today. but Im going to wait till the moon is less bright.

Daniel
:O)

[Rocket Pooch]

yay

[RobertM]

Same here (not yay!)

[Rocket Pooch]

Be careful when you align the target on the chip projection in the software, my targets showed clearly they would  fit on the chip and they did not!

Booooo.

[RobertM]

How much was it out by?

[Rocket Pooch]

about 25%

be carefull I did M65 & M66 and they are both just off the chip, if you have a look at it as standard without rotating it you will see it will fit.

I wrote to the boss, you never know he may let me do it again.

also they do give you bias and darks, from reference so you will need to dark scale or sigma combine.

chris

[JohnP]

Not too good then - good job it was free as you'd be well annoyed...! What did the star field come out like....?

[RobertM]

Chris, thats a real bummer, I'd say you have a good case for another hour.

[Rocket Pooch]

From light buckets

"Hi Chris-



As Alvin explained below, if you don't select a guide star for exposures over 180 seconds on LB-0005 our guide lock system will kick in and find one for you.  It found one at 76 degrees and rotated the instruments to get the guide star on the guider chip.  This changed the framing of your target.  If you compare the attached rotated SkyView window at 76 degrees with your image, you'll see that the framing is dead on.  For most of our observatories, even though all of our instruments are extremely dialed in on polar alignment, guiding will kick in on any exposures over 300 seconds just to minimize any risk of trailing (it is 180 seconds on LB-0005 for some other reasons).  If you use LightBuckets again, it's probably better to pick your own guide star in SkyView rather than have us pick it for you.  This way the framing works out how you want it.  Hope this helps, please let me know if you have any questions.



Cheers,



Steve"

[Daniel]

Chris, what exposures did you use, I found that when I tried to set up an RGB run at 2x600s each I couldn't do it because you have to include setup time into the run aswell.

Daniel
:O)

[Mac]

Just got my free hour

[Rocket Pooch]

5x300 second luminance, that was about it for an hour

[MarkS]

My imaging plan is submitted 

Hint:  Once you have selected your target, SkyView appears with 2 green rectangles - the little green rectangle is the guider.  If the star within it appears red then it will use it for guiding.  You can move the star field around a bit and 1 or 2 other red stars may appear - you can click on one of these to set the orientation with that red star in your guider.

Chris, I guess you didn't select the guidestar and so it just chose one itself which mucked up your carefully arranged FOV.

It appears that not all the stars in the SkyView plot can be used for guiding - I'm surprised how few can be.

Mark