Solar Eclipse retrospective

I began my interest in solar eclipses shortly before the 11 July 1991 eclipse which tracked across Hawaii before crossing Baja California and Central Mexico.  At the time I was working at the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory (LPL) in Tucson following my graduation from the University of Arizona two months earlier.  Some of my colleagues were involved in an eclipse observation trip to the totality in Hawaii, and just the day prior to totality I committed with a friend to drive down to Mexico to try to observe it via hand-built pin-hole projection.  We got close to the path, however we diverted to a beach we knew a bit shy of the 100% line due to fatigue and didn't go any further on the actual day.  No photos were taken, but the love of the event took hold.

More to follow...  meanwhile, here's a picture from the 17 August 2017 eclipse, taken in Casper Wyoming with my portable telescope rig:

5-6 May 18 (a short post)

Successful calibration of the Auto Guider / mount pulse-guiding arrangement  The key issue with all my failed calibration attempts was the hot pixels on the guide camera.

I had never done Dark images for the guider, so all previous guide calibration attempts still had hot pixels on the guide images.  When running those previous calibration cycles, TheSkyX appeared to use the hot pixels instead of a star for calculating tracking rates.

Choosing a star field with very few stars for guiding, it became clear which area of the guide image was being used for calibration, and it seemed to be a single pixel.  This highlighted several consistent pixels across multiple images and made it clear what was necessary.  I processed an auto guide image for dark subtraction and subsequently had my first successful calibration.

With the guider / mount tracking rates calibrated, I can now work to optimize the guider settings.  Current settings:

min move 0.010 seconds

max move 1.00 seconds

aggressiveness - all are 10

results:

M13 60 second clear, guided image

More Galaxies

A few recent updates to the rig...  Current imaging setup:

Explore Scientific 127 APO triplet
Explore Scientific 0.7 Focal Reducer / Field Flattener
Moonlite Crayford Focuser 2.5"

Celestron Five Position Skyris Filter Wheel

Losmandy G11GT Mount

Orion short-tube 80 (F/5) for guiding

Orion Starshoot Autoguider (SSAG)

Explore Scientific 50mm finder

Thunderbolt 2 dock

QHY Polemaster polar scope

QHY5IIIM174 (for imaging)

Skyshed

Next purchase:

Narrowing down my selection for a new imaging camera.

Galaxies:

Captured M51 on the evening of 16 April.  One 4 minute exposure, calibrated with 4 minute dark and a bias image.  Missed the opportunity to get flat field images, so I used some old ones for processing, still pretty satisfied with the result for this unguided image.

M51

Another session last night (20-21 April 18) to capture galaxies.  Also unguided, but this time I did record some flat field images:

NGC4535

M94

Also, here is m81 and m82 in a 240 second exposure, also unguided:

Next session will be focused optimizing my guider parameters.  Looking forward to successful imaging longer than four minutes...



PS: a gratuitous waxing crescent moon shot: