Skyguider Pro and Autoguiding

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

One of the challenges with my astrophotography set up is that its not portable. To be able to take photographs of Deep Sky Objects, I needed a set up that allows for autoguiding while still being portable enough to carry on airplanes. After a little bit of research back in 2022, I found a couple of mounts that I thought would meet my needs. Both were portable tracking mounts (tracking in RA only no DEC motor) that had capability to do autoguiding through ST4 port of the camera. Of the two (Skywatcher star adventurer and iOptron Skyguider Pro), I decided to go with iOptron mount as I had recently purchased another mount of theirs (GEM45) and was pretty satisfied with it. Ofcourse, only a month after I bought the tracking mount Sky Watcher comes out with a portable Star Adventurer GTi which has tracking both in RA and DEC making for better tracking, GoTo capability and pulse guiding through PHD. The mount was announced but was not available to be delivered until a couple of months if I recall correctly. I decided to hold on to the Skyguider Pro and make a decision at a later point if I want to trade-in the Skyguder Pro with Star Adventurer GTi. Only problem is, I never did. We were expecting out second baby so this mount was going to be used when we actually planned to make a trip which was not in the near future. The mount sat in the storage and I just sat on making the trading in decision. Now its too late to get a decent value from a brand new unused mount that is couple of years old when there are much better similar priced optinos in the market available. So I decided I will just use it and not focus on upgrading.

This past month I decided to test out the mount’s autoguiding capability now that my daughter is a year old we have been seriously thinking of starting travel (including camping). I thought testing should be quick and easy but boy was I wrong! We have had a good run of clear night skies in PNW so I set up the mount one night, polar aligned and then tried it with my camera and 70-300mm lens. I hoooked up the autoguider camera (ZWO ASI 120MMS) and guidescope (ZWO 30 f/4) and tried to autoguide with PHD2 with “on camera” as the mount option in the PHD2 setup. During calibration, PHD2 failed saying that there was little to no movement to the east. I tried looking at the cables, connections etc. to make sure if everything was connected right and there were no loose cables. Nope. Everything was connected fine. After fiddling with the equipment for an hour, I decided to give up. Assuming it might have been a faulty cable, I tried to set up the following night again but with different sets of cables. I switched to a ZWO ST4 cable and a different USB from camera to the laptop but no joy. After the second frustrating night, I decided to trouble shoot during the day time and not waste any of the clear nights trying to debug the issue. I used my regular telescope setup to actually gather photons from Deep Sky Objects for the next couple of nights.

To debug, I tried manual guiding by pointing the guide camera to a tiny stationary object during day time but the mount did not budge. With no other ideas on what could be wrong outside of either the wire or the ST4 port on the autogider or mount being broken, I reached out to iOptron for help. After a couple of back and forth emails, I learnt that it could be the ports are wired differently for the camera and the mount. When I looked up the pinouts for the camera and the mount, it was indeed different, although only the RA (left and right) pins were flipped. See below:

Skyguider Pro Guide Port Pinout: Source: https://www.ioptron.com/v/Manuals/3550_SkyGuiderPro_Manual.pdf
Camera Guider Port: Source: https://i.zwoastro.com/zwo-website/manuals/ZWO_ASI_Cameras_Software_Manual_EN(Windows).pdf

To test if this was the issue, I stripped the RJ11/12 wire flipped the 3rd and 6th and crimped a new RJ11/12 socket. I tested it out using the manual guiding method during the day time and was excited to see the mount move. At night, after the kids went to bed, I set up the mount again and launched autoguiding through PHD2. Calibration succeeded on first try and the mount was being autoguided by the camera. To see if I could get long exposures, I tried several 5 minute subs at 300mm and saw no star trails at all. Exciting times!. I now need to try the 600mm lens and test 5 minute exposures but for all practical purposes my “travel” set up is now ready to go. All we need to do is make some trips to places with lower light pollution to actually use my travel set up to get some DSOs.

Here is the image of the DIY ST4 cable:

Astronomy: Eclipse Chasing

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

Our first total solar eclipse experience was in Aug 2017, Prior to that, I have always wanted to view one and never got an opportunity. I had viewed a couple of partial solar eclpises but never got a chance to view totality. In 2017, that changed. I had planned a year ahead, booked a hotel and got a chance to view totality after a last minute panic because of marine layer over Newport Beach Oregon. That experience was surreal. It’s hard to explain in words so I won’t even attempt to do that. Needless to say, we planned ahead for the great eclipse of 2024. We traveled to what we thought would be an ideal place to watch the eclipse from – Austin, TX. We stayed at my buddy’s place whose amazing photography skills you can see below. Even though the totality was for a shorter duration here, we figured we could travel an hour away to get into the maximum totality.

We had booked our tickets to Austin more than 8 months in advance . We had planned it to be a week long vacation so that we could spend some time with my friends family and explore Austin as well. However, couple of days before travel, we shortened our trip as our daughter was recovering from a cold so we ended up going there for 4 days as opposed to 7. As we all now know, the weather forecast across texas was really bad and we had resigned to the fact that we may not be able to view the eclipse at all. Also, based on our past experience of 12 hour driving time back to Seattle area after viewing the eclipse in Newport beach, we decided it was not worth it to drive anywhere with two young kids for an eclipse that we may not be able to view because of the weather.

On the night before the eclipse the weather reports were all ominous saying that Ausin would have close to 87% cloud cover at the time of totality. Assuming the worst, we just decided to stay home and check out the eclipse if we were lucky at all. On the day off, it looked like we might not be able to see anything. The sun was behind the clouds most of the day, peeking out once in a while for a moment or two. Since we traveled all the way to Austin from PNW, we decided to go to a nearby park to atleast enjoy the atmosphere of the eclipse if not for the eclipse itself. We headed to a nearby park a little bit beofre totality and waited.

Amazingly, few minutes before totality, the clouds started clearing out and we were treated to a wonderful total solar eclipse! Although there were clouds rolling in an out as you can see in the first picture, it did not take away from the amazing experience.

When people tell me that they saw a 80% or 90% solar eclpise, to stress the magic of totality, I tell them,only half jokingly, that 0% totality is same as 99% totality for a solar eclipse. As you can probably tell, we are enamoured by this phenomenon and we hope to travel, when feasible, to wherever and whenver it occurs! We may be becoming some of those eclipse chasers you hear about in the media 🙂

Diamond ring. Photo courtesy @amanualjolt

Here is another:

Totality in Austin,. TX. Phot courtesy @amanualjolt

Astronomy: Astrophotography Cable Management

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

I had been meaning to post this for ever. I had, what I thought pretty good arrangement for cable management with my SkyViewPro mount and the ES 102mm. There were only 2 wires going from the mount/telescope down to the battery pack/power supply (technically power supply and router as I was connecting a lan wire to my rasbperry pi). However, with my mount kinda dying and me investing (hehe 🙂 ) in a new one, this setup is not very useful for me anymore. I still thought I should post this for anyone interested in a DIY solution to make cable management easier. I did two iterations of my set up, the second one being much more compact than the first one. Either works. It’s all up to one’s apetite for DIY. I was hoping to do a YouTube video on this as well but never got around to it and now I have dismantled this set up owing to my new mount purchase (details in a later post). This solution may be an overkill for someone who is willing to shell out a few hundered bucks for s device such as ZWO ASI air or ASI Air pro but I like to tinker with things so I built myself a cheap solution. Like I said, I don’t have a video on it so for now pictures and a narrative is all I have. However, I promised a friend of mine that I will build him a similar solution so I’ll plan to record that session and upload it to the interweb.

There are three main components to making cable management easier. All these components need to be placed on the telescope so the smaller the footprint the better it is. My telescope is not that heavy so mounting three different not so compact items did not add too much weight. I used velcro to make sure they stayed on the scope. Anyway, I digress. The components are:

  1. A computer to control the cameras, mount, guidescope, filterwheel, focuser etc. In my case, I used Raspberry pi running astroberry software
  2. A USB hub to run the various devices. Onboard USB ports on Rasbperry Pi are inadequate because of the limite current those devices can draw
  3. A power hub to supply appropriate power to the devices.
  4. 12v to 5v stepdown module

Well, its technically 4 components even though I said three main because the stepdown module doesn’t have a very large footprint :). This setup has served me very well and I would have continued using it with refinements over time, if not for a change in my mount that has pretty good features for cable management. The below image is a top view of all the connections. Not sure if you can tell but there is a rasbperry pi on the left and underneath which is a 7port USB3 hub. On the right is a power hub with 12 outs (a typical fuseblock used in automotives). In hindsight, 12 outs might have been an overkill 🙂 . I just needed 6 which ould have still left a couple open for future enhancements (filterwheel) and a couple of dew heaters. In anycase, with the 12 out fuseblock, the weight on the left was being compensated well on the right side so I let it be. While I would, in the future, need an output port for a dew heater, I currently use a cheapo USB one that I had purchased before I built my own DIY dew heater. When I purchased it, I was worried that it wont have enough power output but it works fine for the scope that I have. So I currently use it just for this scope. I dont need to add another output and the 7port USB hub powers it fine.

Everything connected to the scope with 2 wires going to the mount and one out to the 12v supply

Here is a view with everything connected and you can see the USB and power for the mount folded near the focuser next to the fuse block. I haven’t used the handcontroller in over a year now. I just use the EQ mod cable with a connection directly from the rasberry pi to the mount. It works great!

All the wires connected

The above set up with Astroberry software works just great except for the focus module. I never seem to have gotten it to work. Others have, so I just need to tinker with it a bit. However, as I think I mentioned in one of my earlier post, I always try to spend as much time imaging on clear nights as possible so have been using a Bahtinov mask. It’s probably time to figure out the focus module to get truly remote set up – from my driveway 🙂 .

I was in the process of upgrading the above to a very small footprint setup (think ASI air size 🙂 ) but then my mount died and I purchased a new one so that set up is kinda not useful anymore. I am thinking I will leverage that for my friend to use. Here is how the – in progress – setup looks like:

It has 7 power ports and can be enclosed in a small DIY project box once complete. Like I said, I will try to document the process over view and share when done. Till then … Take care!

Astronomy: When cheap LPF solutions aren’t enough

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

For a little over a year I have been doing astrophotography from my drive way, I have talked about how there is a lamp post right in front of my house creating challenges in photographing North Eastern Sky. I have, over time, employed crude techniques to limit the light intrusion from that lamp post including a crude cardboard placed on the OTA. Last night I was trying to image the fishhead nebula (IC 1795). It is visible on the north eastern part of the sky and I have been avoiding objects on that side because of the aformentioned reason. However, last night I had a plan! Well, what I thought was a fool proof plan. To block out the light pollution from the lamp post, here is what I did:

A relatively inexpensive solution that actually did a pretty goood job blocking the light from the lamp post. It’s a bit short and doesn’t cover the entire lamp but that I can fix for next time around. It has now become a part of my setup! However, the night was still mostly a bust for two reasons:

  1. Full Moon
  2. Autoguiding

I had accounted for the fact that it was a full moon night and hence deliberately chose a target (away from moon) but the second issue forced me to choose another target. Given that the nebula is faint, I wanted to capture as much data as possible which meant atleast 180 sec, if not 300 sec light frames. Unfortunately, autoguiding was failing due to mount backlash issues. From my prior googling, I know that the mount needs to be balanced and not over capacity. I ensured that th mount was balanced before I started. I need to try next time with one less counter weight placed at the end to see if two counter weights are taking mount over capacity. Anyway, because of spectacular failure in autoguiding, I had to resort to unguided images which meant easier targets. I slewed to triangulum galaxy as I thought it would be okay to get 100 sec or less unguided exposures. While I did achieve good round stars and no star trailing (surprised as autoguiding was failing but this worked 😐 ), there was a glow from the moon that washed up the images. I could not go longer exposures for the fear of getting even more glow from the moon. Unfortunately, that meant no salvagable data from the night and a key learning – there is more astrophotography related spending in my near future 🙂 .

I need to decide what the next steps are. First, I think i need to try out another night to see if guiding issues still persist. If so, it might be time to retire the mount. It’s been with me since 2012 and has fallen from my hand more than once. More on my thoughts on that later. Second, I need to decide between continuing with OSC (one shot color) photography from my driveway, knowing that the lamp post light pollution is potentially solved but moonlight is not, or go with RGB with a monochrome camera. The advantage of OSC is that I get the entire color spectrum data at once. Given that I have limited window each night to work with, I can try to wrap up a target in a couple of nights. However, OSC also means I am limited to nights when the moon isn’t a problem or I have to invest in a LP filter or a nebula boost filter that can block moon light as well. Its a couple hundered bucks and I’m set. I do need to research what filter to buy though 🙂 . Monochrome photography means a whole lot of expenses – Monochrome camera, filterwheel, filters. While it might clearly seem that the scale is tipped towards OSC from cost perspective, monochrome *may* be the way to go if I consider long term where I will invest for my potential (hopefully) future observatory. So … A lot of contemplation, deliberation and reflection lies ahead. Will come back and share my decision and the rationale in the next post. Stay tuned!

Astronomy: Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

This year we have a visitor from outer space that is currently on its outward journey from our solar system. It’s the comet NEOWISE with a orbital period of 6700 years, truly a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to enjoy this rare celestial phenomenon. While a comet is nothing but a space rock made of ice and dust, the dramatic tails that these celestial bodies have make for a visual spectacle that is only second to total solar eclipses. The thing that puts them above a solar eclipse, in my view, is the rarity with which these occur.

I have been lucky to see more than one comet in my lifetime. This is the third comet that I had the opportunity to see and the first to actually photograph! The first ever comet I saw was Hale Bopp in 1998 back in India. I had been fascinated by the cosmos and its wonders from a very young age. When I read the news of this amazing celestial visitor, I quietly went up to the terrace of my apartment one night and marveled at its beauty. Despite the light pollution of Hyderabad, the comet was clearly visible in the night sky. Unfortunately, back then, we did not own a camera so I could not capture it in photograph but it was truly a sight to see.

The second comet that I had the opportunity to see was C/2011 L4 (panSTARRS) in 2013. While i missed seeing the comet when it was bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, I got to see it through my telescope during the twilight in Orange county, California. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take a picture of it.

Comet NEOWISE though, offered a spectacular show. While not of the order of comet Hale Bopp (or from what I heard, Halley’s comet), it was still a sight to see. While I still haven’t captured a good quality image, I did get a chance to get some quick snaps of the comet. Here is a picture that I grabbed last week.

Comet NEOWISE in all its glory

I am hoping to go back out this weekend to capture some better images of the comet. This weekend is my last chance to see this celestial visitor and capture images before it makes it way back in our cosmic neighborhood 6700 years later. Not sure if the human race will survive till then given how we seem to act against our own self interest but hoping we realize sooner rather than later that earth is the only home we got and we are all one people. I would like to leave you with a famous quote (more a paragraph) from Carl Sagan reminding us of our place in the cosmos:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known”