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Tuesday 14th, overnight frost, bright sunshine but with white, fluffy clouds from the northwest.
11.00 50/43F In/out. It feels cold in the dome. ASCOM[AWR] missed the sun because C-Du-C insists on only western latitudes. Despite it showing east in Setup. Tracking on and showing in the IH2 screen. Except tracking is NOT on and has to be started manually on the IH2 paddle.
Nothing on the disk. Only the proms at 4 o'clock and 10 o'clock look worth trying for. Being teased by plates of cloud! Increasing the gain to expose the proms. Messy brightness! So I have swapped back to the original PST's BF and ITF. Just to see if it helps.
11.12 Still nothing captured because of clouds! Added the 2x WO Barlow for more scale.11.40 49/42F. Still far more cloud than sunshine! The first prom image at 11.24 is crap! No fine detail. The image is slowly sagging through the field of view. Without any sunshine I cannot correct it. Probably a balance problem. I need to disengage the worms from their wheels for total freedom. Just slacking off the clutches is not enough. It seems to be balanced correctly.
The mounting must have turned in azimuth yesterday as I loaded the telescopes. I used my length of scaffolding pole to turn the whole lot further to the east. A quick rotation of the camera to ensure it was properly aligned. Then check for drift against the SharpCap reticule. Problem solved.It was sunnier in the afternoon but the seeing was awful. The second prom image was taken at 17.25. I was hoping for a late afternoon improvement in seeing. Not so far. Thin, high cloud!
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