Well, after about two years of being shut down and occupied with the construction of our new house, I’ve finally started taking some time to get back into astrophotography. On Black Friday we started looking at solar scopes and H-Alpha filters and I ended up buying a used DayStar Gemini Quark.
Using my QHY5III178 as a monochrome camera, I was able to capture a few videos and get them processed into some reasonably good images.
After that, I managed to repair my CGE Pro (see the video at https://youtu.be/UoY_97RK67w) and rebuilt my imaging rig using a mini PC that rides on the OTA. This eliminates all the long control cables from the mount back to the laptop I traditional used. It’s a bit tricky to run “headless” without a monitor or keyboard, and my traditional Chrome Remote Desktop doesn’t work reliably. Luckily it has Windows Pro and thus I can use Windows Remote Desktop Connection, which works well over the local network.
I haven’t had much integration time so far, but I’ve finished one short imaging session of M33.
The observatory still needs a lot of clean-up, as does everything else around here, but I’m working on it!
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