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Wednesday: After a run of bad or cloudy weather I'm back in the observatory.The mounting could not find the Sun despite being informed of its parking position before slewing in a Goto.
I need to do a proper mounting alignment. The Sun is slowly sinking on the screen some of the time over long tracking periods. Which means the mounting is going high. PA too low or misaligned relative to True North?
I should really keep a written record of such alignment problems. It matters whether the sinking happens around the Meridian or well away from it to east or west.
I haven't been in the observatory in the evening to have any targets for alignment. I have mostly been syncing on the Sun at intervals during imaging. Even this is fraught with potential errors. The camera sees only a tiny proportion of the disk. So Syncing on the limb may be [is probably] giving the drive system inaccurate information.
First, today, I had to transfer and then delete video files from the SSD. I am constantly running out of file space in the 500GB SSD. In retrospect I should have chosen the 1TB. Or increased the size of the onboard SSD in the laptop. Which is only 250GB. I believe internal SSDs are considerably cheaper than external. When transferring files from the onboard to external SSD I get around 300Mbs. When transferring video files from the external SSD to the 4TB expansion HDD I get only 180Mbs. This makes a considerable difference in elapsed time for transfers.
It is proving difficult to extract decent images from today's captured videos. I used the 2x WO Barlow on the nose of the ZWO120MC camera. The view in Registax was awful. It also kept crashing on the Alignment stage.
Paused for lunch and then had to dash over to close the dome shutters when it started raining. Grr! It was a beautifully sunny, though cooler morning. 44-50-55-51F
Click on any images for an enlargement.
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