sv550-122 focus

Filter	Step	Bin	Expose (s)
ir/ 260/sky	17	1	3
220	20	2	10

Filter focus routines with the 122/f7 in fields with few stars.
Current focus steps ~3010

the barren star field surrounding m82 needed...

... a bigger hammer than usual
this was 8s exposures
we settled on 10s 

one frame arriving

xeon cores

 Xeon CPU E5-2696 v2 @ 2.50GHz in a z420 museum piece: 12 cores, 24 threads. It's not fast, but it certainly beats my Ryzen 7 Beelink for astro processing at a fraction of the cost. It also weighs thirty times more!

Here we are using 24 parallel processes during star alignment in SetiAstroSuitePro's stacking module.

homography star alignment with 24 parallel threads

z420 settings

Here are 70 fits frames calibrated and stacked in around 5 minutes... and processed in less than that. Fed up of staring at a comnputer screen!

march galaxies

Two good nights. Guiding averged 0.40 arc-seconds with quite small stars. Not too bad for a cheepo refractor I suppose.

sv550 with, 1.0x field flattener: 122mm f7: fl 854mm 

looking north

looking east

now with focuser

galaxy m106 and friends in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    60x4min @ hcg100

galaxy m63 girasol in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    52x4min @ hcg100

globular cluster m3 in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    34x4min @ hcg100

m3 with a less in-your-face approach

 

kubuntu freeze delay

 Disable and/or remove:

• kwallet
• baloo
• kde connect

Maybe only the latter. Too lazy to go back and try.

HP z440 MEBx stuff

 To disable the statup messages concerning MEBx

AMT: Intel Management Technology

• Press F10 after power-on repeatedly to enter the BIOS Setup.
• Navigate to Advanced > Remote Management Options.
• Set Intel AMT to Disabled.
• Save changes and exit (F10)

some reprocesses

m97    gso203

m1    gso203

m106    sv550 80

 

vixen dovetail clamp

 Cheepo Vixen width dovetail plates, such as this one:

...are too narrow to fit the -equally cheepo- clamp. So we simply remove around a mm from the fixed mating surface: