lukepower

Daniel, there are a couple of things that you need to get a successful solve of an image. First of all, your settings should be correct as far as focal lenght is concerned. Then, the image position reported by the mount needs to be somewhat close/correct. And third, the image should be well focused - I saw that even slightly defocused images yield errors or very long solve attemps. Just my few cents

Actually, if they would open the existent documentation for use by the community (considering that it is still their intellectual property) it would already be a useful thing. I won't be able to attend AME as I am very busy at work, but am willing to contribute anyway. @Christer: Could you please check if you could host MediaWiki with BlueSpice (free version)? In my opinion one of the best Wiki softwares one gets nowadays, which is still regularily updated and has a nice WYSIWYG editor. ANd it would be multilanguage-capable.

Hi Kai, maybe you have to set manually the time it should close the roof...Just an idea

Look at this thread, anno 2013: http://forum.astrosysteme.com/index.php?/topic/200-discussion-about-a-wiki-for-asa/ And here for a (very primitve) example: http://astrosysteme-users.wikia.com/wiki/DDM85_Manual

I think the WIki is the only real option. A user group á la Yahoo Mailing group is not structured enough. A wiki is predestined to create something like a manual with constant updates. The way I see it is like this: Import the latest manuals from ASA directly as text into the wiki. Then, everybody willing to contribute should edit the various sections, adding content and modifying whatever seems reasonable. Starting with an existing text - even if it might be outdated - should be the easiest. As for the software side, MediaWiki with a WYSIWYG editor should be easy enough for most people to understand it. I agree with Nigel that, if this becomes something separated from ASA, a solid user base would be needed to keep it updated. Although I think that there is plenty of knowhow in this forum, so if everybody would spend, say, 1 hour, we should have more information put together than ASA ever did. If Christer could host this thing, well, I guess that would be great. If it helps I could install the software. Administering such an installation should be relatively trivial once it gets going. As an alternative we could use a Wikia hosted wiki (which is free).

I could help with the technical basis (installation of a MediaWiki, for example). This would save us some money, as I'd have enough power on my current hosting plan to add such an installation. Personally I don't want to pay for wiki hosting - not after having paid for the mount lacking documentation. I agree that ASA should not be directly involved, but on the other side a nice feature of a wiki is that it keeps track of the changes over time. If an ASA guy would change stuff there it would be easily recognizable.

We discussed this a while ago. Probabily a WiKi would be a suitable way of collecting the knowledge, as everybody could contribute. The tricky thing is to get it started. Among all the " I will help" guys only a few will actually do the work in the end (and it would be a lot of work!). Another question is who will host this? Maybe the forum admin could set up a Wiki on ASA's webspace and put it to a place like wiki.astrosysteme.com...

Hi Nigel, I have one system running on WIn 10 Pro, and another on WIn 10 Home. Seems to be no difference to me. After the upgrade I had to reinstall some programs but at the end all was unexpectedly easy.

Max, this, regrettably, is an old situation. Once or twice a year we pray for it to happen, but it won't. Look at all the bugs which are still there both in Autoslew and Sequence I agree that MLPT would be better than chasing the seeing, on the other side guiding works very well with ASA mounts (especially if you lower the aggressiveness), so I personally have settled with that.

You're right, now there are plenty of PDFs ... Thanks Nigel!

Hi Nigel, I tried the search but it isn't listing anything for me...

Same night, same setup. But again, honestly, the difference is probabily due to seeing here, too.. If I get with MLPT down to 1.5", with guiding I am not far from that

At the beginning I tried to do all with a pointing model or MLPT. While it was working quie well, there were enough situations where it didn't. Probabily it is due to some flexure in my setup which is not that easy to eliminate. I switched to guiding and since then I have always round stars, as it is used basically to compensate for those slow drifts. I did once a comparison of MLPT vs. guiding: The stars in the best MLPT-frame were slightly smaller than in the guided one.... I guess that the small corrections I apply are causing the star to wobble a bit more than what would be needed.

Well... I sold mine as I had too many problems of mechanical nature (which, by the way, have been fixed in the newer version of the domes), so cannot really help there. I had the pleasure of testing the beta versions of the driver and am impressed about all the surplus features they integrated...

Hi Michael, I used once a ScopeDome dome (now I just use the ScopeDome card with my roll-off roof), I'd suggest to contact Jacek Pala who is the programmer of the driver - he is very helpful and I guess he will quickly be able to help you out

Hi Mark, we had our first full night of observations with the Veloce 200 AT yesterday. Basically, we are not using MLPT or a pointing model - simply a very well polar aligned mount. As for the focus issue, it looks like there are tube currents in the evening which cause some focus fluctuations, but we did not focus at all during the night. Combined with no guiding and no MLPT, we are basically imaging 58 minutes par hour (the rest being slew times and settle times). Damn this is one hell of a combination As for the pointing model issue, I will do a test with my Cassegrain, first by getting it better polar aligned, and then using a very small pointing model (like 15 stars or so) and see what that brings.

it's 5.2.2.2 The thin halos you see are caused by something in the tube built, Officina Stellare is investigating that. Might be the new baffle design (this scope is sort of a beta test of a new one)...

Hi guys, after some testing the unthinkable happened We created a really big pointing file with Sequence, but after loading it we had trailed stars. We tried to disable SuperFit to no avail, soas a last resort we unloaded the whole pointing file. And this is the result (10 minute exposure, cropped): So what do we learn? Sometimes the pointing models are more bad than good...

Mark, as you mention the extended cooling option, how far from ambient are you able to cool? I still wonder how there could be such a big difference between FLI and SBIG, for instance. With the FLI in Spain I easily go down to -30°C (so about -55 from ambient), while the SBIG manages barely to get to -25 from ambient...

Interesting... Well, I found a solution together with ASA so am fine now, however I am thinking about exchanging the 8300 FLI camera I am operating in Spain with an 16200 from Moravian, that could come handy there, too... Let's wait and see

Hi Christer, they told you so? I was told that they have an adapter for the G4 series of cameras, but not the G3 as there was some space constraint...

Hi Waldemar, well the critical focus zone is only 6 myu wide... Actually the tip-tilt system is for the orthogonality between the camera and the scope, and it works quite well. The focuser has extremely fine steps, but we still have to sort out a few things there (mostly software stuff). The scope itself is the "RH" version, which should need no refocusing in a very wide range of temperatures, so that too needs to be checked as it is still not working completely as we'd expect it to do... And yes I agree that the tip/tilt system of the mount is crap - way better the way the DDM85 is doing that.

Hi Waldemar, yes it is indeed very fast. Funnily I did a big pointing model last night which failed to track accurately - no model is better than a real model, it seems. I will have to narrow it down the next nights. We also have some problems with the focus as the critical focus zone is VERY small. The guys at Officina Stellare upgraded the scope recently and they still have to work a bit on the software, but basically we can remotely adjust the tip/tilt of the system, which is awesome considering how crucial the system is in that regard.

Hi Mark, thanks for your effort, and congratulation for that setup and the image. As far as I can tell, it looks awesome! Can't wait to get the new setup running

Hi guys, after a few days of work (I was luckily only involved on the software side, remotely doing that) we got our Veloce 200RH set up in Nerpio, Spain. After a few iterations polar alignment was done: Shortly after we got down to a quick 10 minute exposure. Mind you, we used no pointing file at all: I will go and try to get some more data tonight. This system is impressive, it seems that we do not have to refocus most of the time (only after a temperature drop of 20°C)...