# Finished and Tested



## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

I was finally able to get the total rig out the other night for a test. Took about an hour to get the guider all working but the results were fantastic. 7 arc seconds of error in the RA axis and 5 in the DEC axis. Thats up there with the 8 and 10k mounts. Keeping the weight low vs the capacity and careful 3-D balancing does wonders. Its easier to get things framed now since I can use the handcontroller or software buttons from inside the house. That came with the upgraded electronics for dual axis motors. The guide camera (Lodestar) is really sensitive and low noise. I had an ST-4 the last time it was the first autoguider and it was terrible compared to this one. I had my pick of guidestars easily with a 2 sec exposure. Had a little overshoot on one axis the one I let the program figure out instead of actually testing it. Had the guiding rate a little too high so next time I can tweak that error out. Wasn't much 1.5 or so pixels. But since the mount is tracking so well it only had to correct the position on 30% of the frames shot in the 11 minute run. So 70% perfect on the first run. Of course the cost has gone way up with the capabilities. Not so bad since I can use it for more than just astro. Lots of wires running everywhere now. Looks like a proper imaging mount.

Business end.










Mount and dual saddle with Canon and guide scope and camera. The DEC axis clamps onto the truss just like the single axis camera mount arms.










The guide scope and guide camera. Tiny thing only 1.25 inches wide.










Tons of wires. But it all works and works very well










No excuses not to get some killer shots of deep space. I have to have more surgery or I could loose my leg. Hopefully stents so I'll only be down a few days but if they have to go in there and clean it up it will be 6 weeks. Won't be for 3 more weeks so I'm hoping the weather will clear up for a few days and I can get some images to work on while I'm down.

Griz


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## Troutman123 (Mar 21, 2007)

*Wow*

That is so intimidating to me!!!!!! I have been admiring your work and am looking for a hobby now that I have entered this stage of my life And live out in country no light polution BUT as stated so dang intimidating . How does one get started or is that some dark guarded secret. 
Regards
Matt


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*Not really*

You can get a small tracker you can mount on your existing tripod for around 400 bucks. Or you can go for one of the heavy lifters like I built. I can slap a scope on that rig of mine anytime if I want to go further. Don't think I will the 400 and 7D2 are doing great. Here are some of the trackers to look at.

Vixen polaire










Ioptron skytracker










Star Adventurer a new kid on the block many are singing its praises. Its like the StarLapse I have it will do timelapse as well as astro.










These are all the entry level trackers all around 400 bucks 6lb or so weight limit. Ideally you want to stay under 2/3 of the weight limit. Don't overload or it will never work correctly.

The heavyweights are the Astrotrac which looks kinda strange has to be reset every couple of hours but is very accurate.










And the one I have which is a Losmandy StarLapse.










I chose the starlapse because I needed very long exposure times so I could do narrow band the ability to break it down into as low as 10lb pieces to get it to the yard the ability to go to a full german equitorial mount without selling and rebuying anything. Its made in the USA will go on a video tripod as well as the way I have it set up. You can get the single axis and if you like it and want to go further buy another piece. The Astrotrac and Losmandy will handle 30lbs. I used the pier and wedge that is made for the Astrotrac for my Losmandy 4 holes to drill. If you wanted too you could put a pipe in the back somewhere and use that for a pier. You need some way to elevate it so the center of the axis is pointing to the north star. Then all it has to do is rotate the same speed as the stars do. After that is the same as any other photo to shoot. The processing is different but there are tons of tutorials and lots of astro sites to get help. Stargazerslounge.com is on of my favorites as is telescopeforums.com and the Canon forum has an astro section that has a lot of DSLR and tracker users making excellent shots. So that would be the place to go check out some images made by the various options. So chew on all that info and if you have more questions post up. Its daunting in the beginning but if you go step by step and don't skip steps or get in a hurry you will get good pictures. There is some good tethering software its pretty cheap Backyard EOS is 30 bucks for the classic APT has a free and pay version both of them are excellent pretty much automate the whole process for you. Or you can use a timer to get your shots. Just remember the mount is every bit as important as the camera and lens keep the weight down to 2/3 of the limit of the tracker don't skimp if you are close consider a different alternative.

Griz


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Whoops messed up its astronomyforum.net cloudynights.com is another good one.

Griz


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Man my mind is going to mush. I forgot something that I know all of you are going to go ga ga over. This guy practically invented this technique. Once I saw them I had to try them myself and I now have most of the equpment to do it. I'll have to rent another 400 for a weekend but I have all the rest.

sit down please before you look at these they are mind blowing.

http://astroanarchy.zenfolio.com/p272573124

It don't get any better than this.

Griz


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## Troutman123 (Mar 21, 2007)

*So did all*

This expertise come from classes you can take or trial and error with hours with a mentor or a combination ? These images blow me away


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*Just playing with it*

Just playing around with it finding tutorials on the net and asking questions on the forums. I had a scope and camera set up before but I used it to hunt for comets and asteroids. Didn't really do any of this kind of imaging with it. 15 years ago it was much harder to get done. No one shot color cameras everything had to be done on a mono ccd with filters. The number of images ran into the hundreds for a single finished shot. I tried it a few times but it wasn't my cup of tea. With the DSLR its all different and much easier both on the processing side and the precision of the tracking needed to get the shots. Best way to get started is with the widest lens you have and a tripod. If you look through the threads Stargazer posted up a table that shows the max exposure you can use with a given lens and not get any star trails. So look that stuff up and go outside and take some shots. Then you'll have something to see if you can deal with the processing side with. Before you spend any money. I have a 40mm STM lens I used when I started. You might be satisfied with those many people just shoot the moon and milky way and wide fields of constellations. If everything goes well and you still have the bug then you can get into buying a tracker etc. That is the way I started and its the way I'd recommend if you are unsure if you can or want to deal with it without spending any money up front.

Griz


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## Troutman123 (Mar 21, 2007)

*When I say looking for something*

To get into I mean get into the only camera I own is on my IPhone  
I appreciate your time & generosity I keep watching your work (admiring) and will probably ask more later
Regards
Matt:dance:


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*That will do*

You can use the iphone just get a support of some kind. You can also use them to locate stuff in the sky. Get skyeye or google sky. You point your phone at the sky and it shows a map of what is in front of it. Pretty cool I used it to guide my scope rig until I got the pointing computer. So yea you can use the iphone on the moon and most likely the milky way just wait for a night with no moon for the milky way. I thought you had a DSLR or camera of some kind.

Griz


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## Troutman123 (Mar 21, 2007)

*Sorry if I misled you*

PhOtography has always interested me especially wildlife but in talking with the pros it taks Mega patience to get that Great shot patience I am not known for  and honestly photography may not be my next chapter ........ Your work was fascinating


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*No prob*

All that info is useful to others so no biggie. I have lots of time on my hands.

I'm the worlds worst for patience. Thats why you don't see many birds or landscapes coming out of my camera. I just don't have the patience for it and part of the reason I gravitated towards astro is to try and learn to be a little more patient.

I started out with a Canon t3 cheapest DSLR they make. They are all good these days. Cell phone cameras are pretty decent too and getting better all the time.

I have no patience but when the caca hits the fan I'm more calm than I usually am. I go the opposite way most people do. It made me a good living. But tore up my body. We'd get down to the deadline on a board design or a piece of software and I'd live at work. I've not gone home for days sometimes. They had cots but you don't really sleep in those situations. I was the guy without a degree so I stayed till it was done. Didn't listen to my body telling me to slow down as I got older and it did its damage. I'm a AF TSGT's kid had nothing to start with but a desire to make it. Did what I had to do to get where I wanted to go. Problem is the body is done but the mind still has the drive. I use the photography to satisfy that. It all works out pretty well actually. I just started year 3 with my cameras maybe 60-100 times out taking photos in that period so it doesn't take that long to get to grips with it.

If you just want to get out and look through some scopes and feel it out go to a star party. The Austin Astro Society throws one a couple of times a month. Houston has an Astro Society too they have a huge dark site about 80 miles west. Top notch facilities observatory and lots of pads for people to set up. Lots of Astro Societies spread across the state more than you'd think. Check out one of those and talk to the folks there. Another option is internet robotic scopes. You rent time tell them what you want to photograph and its all done for you. You can watch over the net as they are taken. There are other situations where there are a group of people logged into a specific scope they all share the cost and get copies of the images.

I feel much better since I took up photography. Being retired isn't all that great when you just sit around all day. Seems like when you work all your life you need some kind of routine when you stop or some people just go to waste quick. I saw it all the time when I worked in a hospital lab. Guy would come in for his pre retirement physical all pumped up to get his retirement going and a year later they were totally down and a few more months gone. Whatever you decide to do good luck with it.

Griz


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## stargazer (May 24, 2004)

WOW !!!! VERY cool setup. I can see a bigger lens in your future. :bounce:


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Actually I'm saving up for a Borg 89ED astrograph. That is 600mm of focal length at f4.3. Need it that fast to match it up to the pixel size on the 7D2 so it sampled correctly. With the 400 its right on the money 2.1 arc sec per pixel. Don't want to get too crazy with it and loose my nice wide field. I grabbed the guider logs yesterday and learned how to use PHDLab to analyze and graph out the errors etc. The mount is awesome. Really precise and on target. The run is 11min and change I need to run on that is at least 2x the worm period of 8 minutes so the program can compute the full PE for the whole cycle. So I used the scatter graph of the corrections instead. The green dots represent times the mount didn't have to move red it had to correct. The green box is 1 pixel on the camera sensor which is what I want the accuracy to be. It passed with flying colors the total and rms error is tiny.

So it looks like I built myself a really fine rig. Didn't make any of the mistakes I made the first time through this. Kept the weight well under capacity no huge focal length to make things way more difficult. You can't get the whole Orion Nebula in the FOV a big SCT gives you. Barely the running man. Seeing usually isn't good enough for them to be as sharp as a smaller refractor. Too much mag the central obstruction and floppy mirrors crosses those type of scopes off my list forever. Wish this weather would clear I didn't get any subs last time I was just calibrating the guider. I really want to see what it will do with the guider. Everything should be sharper stars smaller with no bloating and more contrast. And if its tracking right You'll get a more pronounced signal because the part of the image that falls on a single pixel stays there so there is no smearing of electrons to the adjacent pixels. Then throw on the Ha filter and get some real detail. Those narrow band filters are expensive. You think polarizers are high. This thing fits between the lens and the mirror so the actual glass area is tiny. A set of 3 will set you back over 1200 bucks. The moon has no effect on images made with these narrow filters. You can do Ha when the moon is up for your detail layers and switch back to RGB when its totally dark and the colors will saturate better. I'm not going for the whole set. The Ha is the most plentiful and adds the most detail and is only 440 bucks. I might add the others later but they contribute so little to the final image I might just skip them.










I've seen lots of these graphs where the red green was reversed. Not good. I checked and rechecked all afternoon becuase its kinda hard to believe its that accurate. The spec for PE is 20 arc sec this came in at 7. While that is entirely possible usually numbers like that come from a mount that has been tweaked by someone that has been involved with them for a long time. I really haven't touched this one. Other than letting it run for days to break in the gears and applying my secret sauce (corrosionX) its just working that well. Running it for long periods lapps the gears and the super slickness of the CX makes any high spots glide past each other instead of sticking causing higher PE. Thats my theory and I'm sticking too it.

Griz


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## Troutman123 (Mar 21, 2007)

*Thanks griz*

Very similar situation , very , in many ways , in any event , I suffer COPD and afraid have waited too long , doc again tomorrow , we shall see. Again, your work caught my eye some time ago and been following and enjoying. 
Thanks so much for your time

Regards
Matt


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Finally ran some longer guider runs to get enough data for the software to do a profile on the tracking. Its very good. Much better than I expected.

This is a screen shot from a program called PHDLab. It will take the logfiles PHD makes when you are guiding and graphs them and produces a report. I used the PHD2 polar alignment tool to get the PA spot on. Really settles down the guiding. As you can see in this example with all the green dots no actual guiding movements occurred in the 15 minute run. 15 minutes unguided with results like these is 8 and 10K mount territory. Losmandy makes good stuff and its made here in the USA.

The smaller trackers error is around 25arc sec which isn't that bad when the camera and lens are matched up so that 25arc sec isn't more than 1 pixel. So with wider lenses to spread the image out over several pixels you really can't see the error. However if you are at 2.1 arc sec per pixel like my set up 25 arc sec is disaster. And when I am doing narrow band going for extra detail it would all be wasted effort as the smearing caused by that error would smear the details.

I'm working on a little code right now so I can use this usb to relay adapter to mimic the movement keypad on the computer inside the house. On the Losmandy stuff if you start a movement hitting a direction key then hit the opposite key it will shift the speed from your guiding rate 1.5x to 16x for positioning and after 2 sec it will switch up to 32x for longer distances.

When I find something in the spreadsheet that I want to image I pick it the program then goes to the chart program and that sends the new target coordinates to the Argo Navis. When I get outside to make the move there are 2 large numbers on the laptop screen and on the display of the Argo. You make those go to zero and you are on target. The new dongle will allow me to fine tune that position from the comfort of the house. And I can show my wife how to move it so if I'm unable to do much walking she can move it for me and I can refine the position. That way I'm only on my feet for a little while each night as I can carry the mount and all on my scooter.

Had to do some extra thinking and planning so that what I built I could use even if my mobility decreases because by all indications thats what is going to happen. I know from experience that if its hard to get to the yard it will gather dust in the house. I bought the dome to get around just that problem before. So we'll see. The pier is short enough it wouldn't be that hard to build a small enclosure for it and leave it in the yard. If I did that I wouldn't even have to get off the scooter to set up. All the other parts fit in the basket I put on the back for my camera bag. My version of retirement planning 










As close to perfect as you can get with out spending about 3x what I did and the error would be on the order of .1 arc sec. Can't see .1 arc sec so why spend the money. I might add a goto controller and a couple of servos to replace the steppers at some point. Another thousand bucks though so as long as I can get to the yard to move the scope a few times a night I'll skip that too.

Griz


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Decided I wanted to be able to use the hand controller from inside the house. Picked up a usb to relay controller and wrote an app to mimic the controller on the computer screen. My mount will switch up from guide speed to positioning speed if you hit the opposite direction key after you start the move. I mimic that in the software by a little checkbox. If that is checked then the app applies the opposite key 100msec after you press the initial key. Since I'm connected to the laptop outside via teamview I can now move the scope to frame stuff from inside where I have a large monitor so I can see better. Also the wife can move the scope for me when my legs are being a problem and I can refine the position from inside. Its set up to put a couple of numbers on the laptop screen when I pick an object off the star chart program. All you have to do to get it pointed is make those two numbers to go zero. Its pretty accurate but you still need to nudge it a bit to get it framed up nicely.










Haven't written any code in years but its just like riding a bike you never forget. Went together fairly easily so far. The handpaddle just shorts to ground the pin for the direction key so its perfect for a relay.

Griz


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*At it again*

Decided to cobble up a goto system for my rig. Bought a SciTech servo controller and a pair of servo motors with their own encoders and 25:1 gearboxes. Those encoders are much more accurate since with the gear reduction there are 4 million + pulses for a 360 deg rotation. Extremely precise pointing and tracking. It will slew at 10 deg/sec with these motors. So half a minute for a complete rotation. I won't be running it that fast gotta watch out for cable snags etc. I think I have that all figured out tough. Tied all the cables together to make them nice and stiff and made a stand off from a coat hanger to keep them out of the way.

Lots of stuff to read to get this running. Its more of a tinker's system than something like the Losmandy Gemini which is already set up for the motors and mount. No biggie just a little math and looking up some stuff. Have to make up your own cables when you go this route as well. I did mine with DB-9 connectors set up so there is no way to plug things in the wrong way. (helps in the dark)

All my parts were held up in Denver due to the weather so I'm not putting it together this weekend  I should have it done for the next clear stretch of sky though. And with a little luck the Ha filter will be here so I can use that as well. Moon won't bother me anymore. I can shoot right up till its full with no problems. The Ha has only a 6nm window so nothing bothers it really. I hope it gets here while my brother is here this time so I can test it out in Houston. That should be an excellent test of how it cuts light pollution.

Now I don't need to use a polar scope or even see the pole star. Automatic recenters using a plate solve. Spiral search goto from a planetarium program extremely accurate tracking and periodic error correction. And its continuous motion not stepping. Everything is configurable on the controller. Has its own API so I can write my own controller software if I want. Comes with a pretty nice set of software but there are always improvements or making it more to your liking if you have the API.

I'm going to use the USB to relay controller to turn on a camp lantern and pov camera so I can watch the slews from inside the house to make sure nothing is going to get snagged or hit on the pier. It does an automatic meridian flip so that is one less thing to worry about. The meridian flip occurs when the axis is parallel with the ground and to keep tracking the camera has to go below that point where its easy to get it hung up especially with my mount since it has the tension cables. Now it warns lets me finish up a shot then flips automatically and recenters to the exact same place as before so your sequence is the same all the way through. You can even use a star to lightpaint names etc with it  I'll be able to script this one like my old set up to do the whole night's imaging on its own.

Griz


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