A new guiding camera - Zwo ASI174MM

Atik changed their drivers and I couldn't connect them in PRISM anymore. Also, when looking at my pareto of failure root cause, I had a third due to Atik cameras. Of course it is not clear whre the exact issue is but there seems to be a memory leak with the Atik Titan and the driver/software chain. And lot of unstability.

Anyway, I decided to replace my Atik Titan guiding camera and I purchased a Zwo ASI174MM after couple of tries with my ASI 178MC (color) camera which were not very successful. With the 174MM it went very smooth, very nice images (and LARGE field of view now!).

I reprogrammed the script with this new camera, I added a bias frame when doing guiding calibration (much better images) to avoid guiding going crazy on some popcorn pixels... Anyway, early july I am now running this new camera and I am able to do Astrometry.Net astrometry easier with the large field of view.

Spring at the observatory

 the new Zwo ASI174MM guiding camera

evening, after work, at the observatory! :-)

morning end of the semi-automated observing session