Some deep sky objects

July 15th: tonight I tried to put the Pulsar dome rubber at the bottom of the dome to improve the friction from motor wheels onto the dome & for the Dome Tracker rotation coder; but unfortunatly I realized I had the short version for a 2.2m dome. No panic, I removed it and went as the night before. It is not perfect but it works.

For the Losmandy Titan mount with Gemini 1 controler, I use the Gemini ASCOM driver (v1.0.56.0). I have lot of time out errors, certainly my serial cable or USB/RS232 converter. I am waiting for the Moxa to arrive so I can control both Dome Tracker & Gemini through Ethernet...

I realized it's better to start like this:
-Switch ON the telescope (Gemini)
-Run Gemini ASCOM & connect to the telescope mount
-Then run PRISM and connect to the ASCOM driver & Dome Tracker

I also noticed the time out errors occured a lot during GoTo... something to investigate!


OK, despite this, I have tried couple of imaging of Messier (classical) objects. Camera is an old PL1M (QHY5) CMOS, very noisy so images are not very good. But I was impressed by the pointing accuracy with just one star alignment and a polar alignment done through the Titan polar scope.

Here are couple of screen shots of PRISM during the session & some quick images (sum of 11x 20sec exposures for each object - all automatically done in Prism with the auto preprocessing menu). Again, very poor quality images due to the CMOS camera used... the main goal was more to run Prism + Gemini + Dome to see how it all work together.

 Messier 11 open cluster

 

Messier 27 (Dumbell) planetary nebula

Messier 57 (ring) planetary nebula

Messier 71 globular cluster