Reservations, Smoke, and One Night of Imaging

A few things from a less than fully successful week of dark-sky camping:

Reservations

The initial state park reservations I had were for three nights starting Tuesday. Clouds and rain looked very likely to wipe out the first two nights so I cancelled the reservation and made another for 3 nights starting Thursday when the forecast was much more favorable: one iffy night followed by two that were perfect.  I decided to get everything set up and running that iffy night after seeing the Sun wink out as it set into a heavy smoke layer on the northwest horizon. This turned out to be a good move as this would be the only useable night. The heavy smoke arrived by Friday morning, when two hours after sunrise the Sun was a dim red ball you could look at directly. 

Lesson learned: Minnesota state parks offer same-day reservations.  Next time I'll wait until I'm sure the night will be clear to make my reservation.  All my things are very well organized and I can pack the car and be on the road in less than an hour. My preferred dark-sky camp, Lac qui Parle, is lightly used and usually has unpowered pull-ins available.

Mount Safety Limits

By the time I was ready to shut down that first night my mount had rotated to the point that it was well beyond its safe travel limit. This didn't really matter as looking to Polaris allows much further travel than is usually safe, and the G-11 mount tracks nicely even when it's over-rotated and the counterweight shaft is well beyond horizontal. 

That said, what I expected was a meridian flip sometime around midnight. When that didn't happen I recycled the system and expected go-to would put the scope on the correct side. It didn't. I could see that eventually I'd run the camera against the mount and decided to let it go right up to that point before stopping. 

I got enough frames that night, but in a month when I return to shoot color frames I'll have to stop even earlier in the evening. 

Lesson learned: I need to configure NINA and my Gemini-II mount control to properly handle flips.

Here are two videos that I found useful for doing this and for setting up NINA for flips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk8uOikHPb4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N0U5chskCQ

There's also a very useful spreadsheet available to members of the Gemini-II user group on groups.io (See the second link above for how to use the spreadsheet.)

I've made the changes to my Gemini-II and go-to now seems to put the telescope on the correct side based on the limits. Seeing if automated meridian flips work will have to wait for a night under stars.

The Coleman Bug Shelter (Previously mentioned here.)

This was my first night out with the shelter, and it worked great--no gnats, no mosquitoes inside. I sat in the shelter linked to the scope with a 16' active USB 3 cable (which was also getting its first all-night imaging test). There wasn't a single glitch. The only awkward part of this is doing polar alignment, when I (and the laptop) need to be at the mount to make adjustments. Once that's done, it's back into the Coleman. It was so comfortable in there that I spent most of the evening relaxing with a good book.

Lesson learned: I'm ready for next year's Nebraska Star Party and its all-night supply of mosquitoes. Will the shelter, even when staked down, be able to endure the winds of Nebraska?

The Results

If the Eagle Lake Observatory setting is Bortle 4 plus a bit, then Lac qui Parle with Thursday night's smoke was Bortle 4 minus a bit: definitely darker than Eagle lake, but certainly it wasn't the Bortle 3 I've seen  there before. Despite that, I gathered 113 luminance frames. Seven were discarded for being in twilight, and one was lost for poor tracking. Adding the new 105 frames to the previously collected 72 Eagle Lake frames brought me to about 4.4 hours of total luminance exposure.

Here is the result, as produced by PixInsight's WBPP and some modest postprocessing of my own:

IFN (luminance, 4.4 hours)

This is much better than my 72-frame image, and it may be all the luminance I need to collect. Using the 3:1:1:1 "standard LRGB model" what's left to shoot is perhaps an hour and a half of each color channel. I have the new moons of June and July to collect my color frames.

Lesson learned: some smoke at a Bortle 3 may be better than clear sky at a Bortle 4+ site.  Given enough good nights I'd still like to add more luminance and get to 6:1:1:1, but good nights around here seem all too rare.

Satellites Galore (with bonus Trek Humor)

These are the satellite tracks rejected by PixInsight. There are a lot of them in 4.4 hours!

"Go home, Tholians, you're drunk"

That's all for this post. In a couple of weeks the moon will go away again and I'll try to get the color data that will bring this luminance to life. 

Extending USB 3 to Your Imaging Platform, Back to Lac qui Parle, and Amazon Vine Reviewing

I have only the vaguest sense of how USB 2 and 3 differ, but I do know how upgrades can mess up things you have running smoothly. Between mosquitoes and equipment upgrades here is what my relationship with USB has been...

The Shaky Start

In my pre-CCD days I imaged with a DSLR and used PHD for guiding via USB 2 (remember Shoestring Canon-to-USB cables?). The USB 2 sockets on my laptop were so poor that losing connection was a frequent occurrence. Getting Com port numbers sorted was not fun, and I had serious doubts about the technology. 

USB 2: True Love at Last

Everything became USB 2: Mount, imaging camera, guide camera, and eventually electronic focuser. The old laptop was replaced with a new one that had better connection hardware and it all worked wonderfully together. After the 2019 Nebraska Star Party I purchased a portable screened shelter to keep away the bugs, the plan being to use one of the ubiquitous USB 2-over-Ethernet extenders to pass from the shelter to the imaging platform, and it worked. Happiness and bliss were mine!

Coleman 10x10 Skylodge Shelter. It's also useful at night.

Upgrading Woes

Time doesn't stand still; things change. In my case I upgraded imager, guider, and focuser; they all became USB 3. And surprise! The USB 2 extender would no longer be adequate. 

I needed to reach about 15 feet from the shelter to the imaging platform. A USB 3 cable that long is well beyond the suggested length limit, so I needed another solution. There wasn't much to choose from: expensive wireless hubs (ASI Air+ and beyond), DIY-ing together a minicomputer and wifi unit, or a USB 3-over-Ethernet extender hardware solution. I didn't care to spend the $300 or more for wifi and I really didn't want to wade into the issues around adding a minicomputer. And I could not find an Ethernet extender for USB 3. But there was another option...

Active USB 3 Cables to the rescue

Active USB 3 cables use signal amplification to provide greater cable lengths, with the determination of "greater" left to the cable maker. The performance of these seems to be something of a mixed bag. Some people have reported that active cables don't play well with the gear I have from Pegasus and ASI, but I suspect that comes from not supplying power at the imaging (female) end of the cable. The one I bought is 16 feet long, and provides the option for a power input at the imaging end of the cable. 

Active USB 3 cable

The power input posed a wrinkle. Like most active cables the input uses 5V input through a 3.5x1.35mm plug. The source for this power is usually an AC adapter of some sort. This isn't handy in the field unless you have AC--which will not be the case for me. 

My power box is all 12V automotive sockets or Anderson Powerpole connectors, so there's no built-in 5V output. The solution was to use an old 12VDC USB device charger that I had lying around. It's designed to plug into the same automotive sockets that I have on my battery box. Because the charger and active cable combined uses maybe one watt it won't affect my battery's energy budget much at all.

Typical Automotive plug USB charger

What I didn't have is a USB 2 power cable with a 3.5x1.35 plug on it, but Amazon had that, too.

The short cable between charger and active cable

The end of the active cable can be strapped to a tripod leg and then a short USB3 cable runs from it up to my Pegasus Powerbox for distribution.

An indoor test of this with everything running under the guidance of NINA was perfect. The powered cable had no issues with any of my things, Pegasus electronic focuser, ASI 2600 CCD, or ASI120 guide camera. The mount was happy with the USB 2 carried on the cable, too. NINA collected 57 images, and downloaded them all plus continuous PHD2 frames without a single fault. A test under the stars is needed, though, since that will add guiding instructions to the data flow.

This is a timely fix for my upgrades, because at the end of July it's time to go

Back to Lac qui Parle

Yes, despite the storms of my first night there, I've reserved 3 more nights at Lac qui Parle near the end of July.

I can't decide on the imaging target for this jaunt. I should probably finish my Veil mosaic, but I'd rather do that from Eagle Lake. How about a two-panel mosaic of the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae? Both transit around the time it gets sufficiently dark for imaging, so I can avoid the dreaded meridian flip and the minor glow of Montevideo in the southeast. Given the limited altitude of these targets it will be one one panel per night. 

Do you think I can get two clear nights out of three? Me neither.

Speaking of Amazon....

I've been a regular reviewer of the things we've purchased from Amazon and apparently that tripped their AI into thinking I should be a Vine reviewer. Vine reviewers are the ones who get their reviews tagged with "Vine Customer Review of Free Product." Basically we get products for free in exchange for a timely review. The catch is that the value of the product (as given by its possibly inflated retail price) is treated as taxable income. In my wimpy tax bracket this means almost everything I review is mine at a crazy large discount.

Thank goodness Vine allows me to choose what I will review. Most of the products offered on Vine are things that I probably would never need nor want. For example right now there are 75,468 items available for review. An awful lot of them are odd-looking cases for cell phone models I don't own, silicone ice cube molds, and other things of doubtful value, so a wise reviewer must hunt a little. 

It also helps to not play Amazon's game of trying to be a Gold Tier Vine Reviewer. The gold tier requires one to make a lot of reviews in exchange for being offered items over $100 in value. As one Redditor commented, his obsession with maintaining gold tier status was filling his house with shipping boxes and the stuff that came in them. I'm quite happy to remain a peasant in the silver tier. Actually, if there was a tin tier I'd be cozier in that.

But Vine can be useful because every now and then something of interest gets listed, and if you can grab it before someone else it's yours.

My lust for lithium is leading me to glom onto small LiFePo4 batteries that are great for camping. I've now collected four batteries, and will probably add more. A couple of them will be dedicated to augmenting my laptop's battery. Another will power my camp fan for those hot, breathless days and nights. Depending on how many more of these I score I may bring some up to Northern Nights Star Fest as swap meet fodder. Oops, no. Vine rules say that items must remain mine for six months.

Another Vine offering I may use for astronomy is one of their large table covers. These are waterproof, silvered on one side, and have tie-downs. Does that sound like a tarp for covering an imaging platform? It sure does and for a cost to me of about $10. I'll let you know how it works out.

Table cover fabric (note silver interior lining)

Table cover black side out in conventional use