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Friday: I found a lot of large, aluminium box sections in bright and clean aluminium at the scrap yard. They were so nice I went back with the car to fetch them all. The longest was 2 meters of 100 x 200 x 3mm [6'6" x 4" x 8" x 1/8"]. With several shorter lengths. There were other, smaller sizes of rectangular, box section too. Now all I need is the inspiration to make good use of it all. It was far too good to leave behind. A bit heavy for a beam telescope but an English mounting would do. I'll think of something.
Friday evening was another attempt at lunar imaging. However, the seeing was really awful again. With violent thermal shaking and variable, thin, high cloud obscuring the surface. A strong lunar halo varied over a couple of hours and there were few to no stars visible in a milky sky. Near the end of my two hour struggle there was just a hint of a Plato craterlet on the screen. It had vanished by the time I had mangled it with Registax.
Registax crashed so many times this evening I may have to give up on it. I had uninstalled and downloaded a fresh Registax package and update. Nearly every time I tried to "Align" the active screen went white and blank and the lunar image never returned. The Set Align Points system is also broken. It did not change the number of points regardless of slider Strength or numerical setting. It was throwing a ridiculous 400-600 or more, red spots, which were not removable nor even variable. Though I could add more by clicking on the screen!
An AWR-ASCOM "denied connection" popped up every single time I tried to make a new SharpCap setting in the menus on the right. HitechAstro's focuser panel showed NO ASCOM connection. PHD2 could not connect to ASCOM. I kept getting notices saying that things would not work without "main machine" running. "AWR-ASCOM Connection denied" again and again. I ran another ASCOM Diagnostics check but all seemed well with only a few exceptions. Does ASCOM diagnostics check the AWR-ASCOM driver?
On both evenings AWR demanded a Calibration Sync of the Parking Place before it would allow a Set Park. On both occasions, despite getting a fresh calibration it missed the moon using C-Du-C guidance by a mile on both slews. By ten degrees at least. Later, when I reached the Meridian, there was the usual bleep, Lunar tracking stopped and the moon began to race across the SharpCap screen! I had to restart Lunar tracking several times over both evenings. This happened during solar imaging earlier on Thursday when it suddenly forgot to track. See the next, exciting episode!
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