From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: January 20, 2010 5:04:28 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] New Images

Mark;

I rarely ever do visual anymore and the cameras are nearly permanently attached, so yes I do my star aligns with a Camera Attached. Each time you remove the camera your asking for dust to get in your optical path and on your CCD.

I Re-center the Guide Scope on what the Camera sees as center, NOT what your eye sees in the eyepiece. Then both are in synch, assuming someone doesn't remove the guide scope or bump it out of alignment.

As for collimation, I turn on the Reticule in Astro IIDC, which puts up a cross hairs with concentric circle on the screen. I defocus the star and then adjust the knobs on the SCT secondary mirror until the star is concentric with the circles. If it's too faint, I bin the image 2x2 or 4x4 so I can keep the frame rate high.

The NAB Forecast and CSK are calling for very steady skies tonight, so I've reconfigured my C8 for lunar and Planetary (Mars) imaging this afternoon. I have to check the collimation in about 1 hours time using aldebaran and I'll simply use Astro IIDC to do that.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle

On 20-Jan-10, at 4:33 PM, Mark Gaffney wrote:

Hi Milton,

Mine`s the basic CG-5 though I guess you`re talking about an operation familiar with it too. You`re doing all your alignments(I gather) using the cameras? That`s much more advanced than me. I`ve had trouble focusing stars with the cameras when I`ve tried. This is perhaps as I`ve been trying in not very star rich areas-basically working with really bright stars like Sirius & Canopus.Then there`s that problem I`ve talked about before where the camera is naturally a little offset from the target causing me difficulties?! With VNC I had Mac to Mac screen sharing done easily. It was back & forth from the PC to the Mac that was the trouble. I wanted to try collimating with Metaguide at least but I`m back to my quite cumbersome monitor on long VGA cable- extended usb ones for keyboard/mouse..With the initial alignments I find their accuracy is often compromised a distance from the alignment stars.

Mark.