The Lust for Power, Part 1

Okay, maybe not so much lust as desire.

For the last five years or so my dark sky imaging has relied on two deep cycle batteries. One of the batteries had been allowed to discharge to nearly dead but with regular recharging seems to have recovered, although there's no doubt it lost some of its life.

These are group 27 unsealed lead acid batteries that weigh about 55 pounds each. With that weight you might expect them to have good amp hour (Ah) ratings. What are their capacities in Ah? They're labeled with two RC values: 200 for a non-standard 23A drain rate, and 175 for the standard 25A rate. The higher drain rate translates to a capacity of 73Ah and as expected the slightly lower drain of 23A gives a capacity of 76.7Ah. My expected drain rate of 6.5 amps is much lower and should suggest a larger yet AH value. Another practice is to take the Ah to be half the RC; for my batteries this would be 87.5Ah.

The upshot of all that uncertainty--and battery capacity is notoriously difficult to quantify--is that I'll assume the batteries started their lives with an AH value around 80. What it is now I can't say, other than it's less.

Even that conclusion has to be questioned, for some of those amp hours are coming when the voltage is well below 12V. Will everything keep working at 11 volts? SBIG says my CCD will work even at 10V. Kendrick controllers basically turn off when the voltage drops below 11.6V. (They're quite adamant about this and have refused pleas to disable the low voltage cut-off.) The CGEM's ability to handle low voltage is questionable, though; there are reports that it will begin to fail when the voltage goes below 12V.  So even if my batteries are able to produce 80Ah, they're not all usable.

Time for some "ground truth." How have the batteries performed in the past? Probably their biggest single star party workout came at the 2014 Nebraska Star Party where I imaged for seven and one half hours at an hourly drain of about 6A (see below). This probably says more about the lack of clear sky time than it does about the batteries.

Hauling batteries like this on long road trips is a bit of work, and does present a small risk that the batteries could leak acid. So far I've never tipped them over, but an unpleasant accident almost seems inevitable. So it may be time to replace them, and what follows is my exploration of the options.

Power Requirements

Some dark sky star parties are three nights, others are four, and all of them that I attend are during the summer or early fall. A typical summer night is completely dark for only about five hours; by the equinox this stretches to nine hours. Rather than estimate a nightly power need, an hourly power consumption is probably more sensible to use. ADDED: I was able to actually measure some of the values, and those are added in [red].

• CGEM Mount: During fast slews it can require 1.5A [1.4A], but when tracking it's more like half of that. Let's assume a 0.75A [0.35A]demand while imaging.
• SBIG ST-8300M CCD Camera: The spec sheet says the camera draws 3A at 100% cooling. A more typical cooling load is 60% of this, so I'll assume a steady 2A draw.
• DSLR instead of CCD? probably more like half an amp. [With the display off, my Canon T2i, draws 0.13A while idle,  0.19A while imaging. The 12VDC-to-7.4VDC converter is 0.03A of those values.] 
• Laptop: My old Gateway's AC power adapters says it runs at a maximum output of 3.4A @ 19V, so at 12V that's more like 5.4A. This agrees with my 12DC adapter's spec sticker that says it permits up to 5.6A. That's the load when it's running and charging the battery. A more realistic load is closer to half that, so I'll say 3A to be on the high side and include losses in the 12VDC to 19VDC adapter. [While charging it draws 5.6A, and 2.1A when fully charged. These values don't take into account computational demand of autoguiding.  Included in these values is 0.12A for the 12VDC-to-19VDC converter. Plugging in the Orion StarShoot Autoguider adds about 0.5A. Dimming the display to its minimum cuts half an amp from the draw.]
• Dew Prevention: I use Kendrick dew prevention, and the power need varies greatly with the telescope objective diameter. At 100% power the strip I use for the guide scope draws 0.3A, for the 4" scope 0.9A, and for the 9.25" scope, 2A.  So my range is 1.2 to 2.3A. Because I almost always use a power setting half this, I'll take the dew demand as .5 to 1A [The low setting actually ranges from 0.17A (6" strap) to 0.97A (28" strap)]

How does this add up?

1. The maximum is imaging with the C9.25 on a dewy night with autoguiding: 6.75A [6.0A]
2. Small scope on a dewy night with autoguiding, 6.25A [5.2A]
3. On a dewless night both drop to about 5.75A [5.0A].
4. DSLR + lens, no guiding? 4.3A [0.7A].
5. There are more combinations, but let's stop here.

The reality is that I seldom image more than a few hours a night. If we cap the maximum number of hours at four per night, the nightly power need for Case 2 above is about 26AH [21Ah], so a four-night party would need 104AH [83Ah] if it was clear every night.

At the other extreme is using a DSLR and using the laptop only for focusing. This would require only 21AH [11Ah]!


Next time in Part 2, can I use batteries to meet my imaging needs?