Alignment problems with Celestron Advanced VX

Unfortunately, I have had relatively short windows so far, usually shortly clouds started covering the sky.

I aimed the telescope approximately to north. Then I made a 2-star alignment. Some times I tried to improve the accuracy with a third star.

After that I drove different objects with the GoTo. Mars and Orion Nebula were not visible in the eyepiece and I had to correct by hand. The Andromeda galaxy (near Zenith) was always visible in the eyepiece.

Even when I did the aligment with StarSense (including calibration and re-alignment afterwards), the accuracy of the GoTo was poor.

On the Internet, I found some post regarding the same problem. So I did a factory reset as described there.

Then I did a new alignment, calibration and re-alignment with StarSense. And indeed, the GoTo worked fine afterwards. All approached objects were visible in the center of the eyepiece.

So I ventured a few shots of the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda galaxy with the EOS 550D. The selected ISO setting (3200) was obviously too high. Although you could recognize the object after 15s exposure time, but the noise was much too large.

Unfortunately, clouds did build up so I could not make any more attempts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Starizona HyperStar 11 V4

Image
December 26, 2020 was finally a clear night. Of course, I finally wanted to try the Hyperstar V4 with the Celestron 11 EdgeHD. So I tried it first with the Orion Nebula (M 42). Already after short exposure times the nebula stood out well. Nevertheless I worked with 30s exposure time (as I had done before with f6.3 and f10). So I hoped to capture more details on the one hand, and the image was not overexposed yet. Raw image stacked in Atik Infinity software (Atik Horizon OSC, 90 frames at 30s low gain) This is the raw image which the Atik Infinity software had stacked. You can clearly see how the stars are quite round in the center and look more and more like small comets towards the edge. This indicates that the sensor of the camera was too close to the optics. That means I will have to position the camera a bit further away in the future. Although the raw material is not convincing, I still stacked and processed it with PixInsight. Interestingly, the effect with the comet-like stars w...
Read more

22nd of March 2019

Image
The weather today was reasonably good, unfortunately a bit hazy. Nevertheless, I wanted to do a few experiments with higher ISO values and possibly longer exposure time. First, I took a few shots of the Orion Nebula with ISO 1600 and 30s shutter time. This only to see how the higher ISO setting affects. Here is a picture of 25 stacked frames with ISO 1600 and each 30s exposure time with the EOS 550d: The result looks pretty good. Also on the display of the camera, the individual images looked very good. Therefore, I was optimistic that the images of the Crab Nebula and the Bode's galaxy will also be significantly better than the last attempts. When I stacked the pictures with Astro Art, the result was disappointing. It was worse than all previous attempts and that although I took more pictures than the first attempt. Apparently the light from the moon (it was almost full moon) was too strong to take good pictures. So I took another picture of the moon. Also with the EOS...
Read more

ZWO ASI 6200 MC Pro First light

Image
Finally a clear night again. There were a few high clouds, but nevertheless I could finally try out the new ZWO ASI 6200 MC Pro on February 16. The clouds were noticeable in the photos, but the result was still promising. At least I could try out a few things and among other things initialize and activate the autofocus function in the Voyager. So from now on I can automatically refocus during longer image sequences. On February 17th it was clear and I had programmed the following objects to be photographed: - M 31 - Andromeda Galaxy - M 42 - Orion Nebula - M 45 - Pleiades - IC 434 - Horsehead Nebula The Andromeda galaxy soon disappeared behind the house, and so I could take only 10 pictures, which were not enough to make a good photo. Next I processed the Pleiades. From 48 pictures à 30s the following picture was created: M 45 - Pleiades: ZWO ASI 6200 MC Pro, C 11 EdgeHD, Hyperstar V4.0 After that I started with the Orion Nebula. From 138 images à 30s the following image was created: M...
Read more