Sunday 10.11.19 Wrestling with software!

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Sunday: 32-43F. 0C. Early sunshine looks promising. Though there is lots of cloud and some mist.

Tomorrow's forecast is still for solid cloud and even a few showers. Sunshine again on Tuesday. I shall be 85 by the time Mercury shows off its miniscule self against the sun's disk again. By then I shall probably be up to my ankles in sea water here at a modest 60 meters, 200' above 2019 sea levels.

After morning coffee I'm off to the observatory to test the driving and imaging software again. I shall need to wrap up warm!

I have been doing some homework on computer memory and can expand both the internal RAM and the SSD at some expense. My ASUS has a big cover underneath. Which exposes both the SSD and RAM with the removal of two screws. I'd have to transfer the Windows 10 OS over if I choose a bigger SSD.

Three restarts later. Not a good start! Finally I now have C-Du-C, FireCapture and HitechAstro DC Focus playing nicely together. I had plenty of time because the sun quickly disappeared behind thick cloud!

I have reset FireCapture display scale several times but nothing changed. Then I had to do another restart and FireCapture is now suddenly visible without using an electron microscope! Why, oh why, oh why, oh why, would software be so clever it can tell you have a high res. display and laptop?

Then hides the means to change it several miles below the surface of totally inscrutable symbols. Display adjustment controls should be at the very top in huge writing! I have wasted hours and hours over several months trying to get FireCapture to adapt to my screen resolution and laptop.  

Why would imaging software needs its own special settings just to be visible? Every other app, including Windows and the browser are now in huge text!

Solar tracking stopped on the meridian again! I have already had to reverse Dec drive direction this morning. The cursor headed straight down into the darkness below the horizon on its way to the sun.

FireCapture offers auto-guiding but resented my first attempt with the ASI120. It has sent me back to Settings >  Hardware > Telescope. No idea why.

I'm enjoying lunch indoors and warming up after hours out in the dome. Where it had reached about 40F. Now I am indoors the sunshine is continuous. I haven't had more than a minute of clear sunshine all morning!

Back out again and fired up everything. FireCapture is now huge and I still have no idea how to change it back! Totally opaque!

I managed to get auto-guiding going without a clue how I did it in the end. I have four arrows in the corner of the live capture frame with flashing red arrows for correction. Is it using the live image from the 174 in H-alpha or the added 120 in the Vixen 90mm?

ASCOM wouldn't play on auto-guiding via FireCapture so I had to set to "ST4 internal" on camera. I am being constantly teased by cloud! I am also being tormented by off axis brightness. I think I need the tilt plates. Duly applied but with only limited usefulness.

Pulled the ST4 plug on the 120 "guide" camera and FireCap is still auto-guiding happily in H-alpha. Wow? It was short lived though, because the cloud kept dimming the image beyond FireCapture's ability to lock onto an anchor. I still haven't found how to keep an accessible link to open FireCapture. It seems it has to be run from the download every single time. Can that be true?

So, I returned to SharpCap and captured loads of videos of the nice proms. I have them on the external SSD so I can work in comfort processing them indoors on the PC. A couple of hours of unbroken sunshine. Tomorrow is still forecast to be solid cloudy all day. Grr!

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