Iowa Star Party Imaging

I'm back from the Iowa Star Party! This is held each year at Whiterock Conservency; the observing field is located about five miles southeast of Coon Rapids, and 60 miles from the center of Des Moines.

2024 ISP had some differences from my previous attendances:

• This year's October party was much more pleasant than the steam baths provided by the usual summer dates. Every night had nice cool sleeping weather for us tenters
• The usual evening banquet wasn't prepared on-site and served in the picnic area; instead it was catered and held indoors at the very comfortable Bur Oak Visitor center. It was moved to lunchtime so that it wouldn't interfere with public night. The earlier time also allowed us to be at the field well before dark
• The field was in great shape, and the addition of a modern bathroom / shower facility was very welcome. I had the distinction of setting up farthest from the bathroom, so it was easy for me to get my daily steps in!
• Saturday night was clear, but the high winds during the day put a lot of dust in the air and really enhanced the brightness of local light domes, which have grown much more prominent in recent years. The low, very dark southern horizon may be thing of the past

But let's get to the imaging.

Friday night I was all set up, polar aligned, and ready. First target was Panel2 of my Veil Nebula mosaic, and the scope was doing its slew, center, and rotate thing. But it never finished because something was causing it to throw errors related to the mount control. 

The usual power cycling didn't clear it. What followed was several hours of swapping cables in and out and trying every other remedy I could imagine. Eventually I started to get the sense that the problem was my Pegasus Powerbox, so I recabled everything to remove it from the USB data flow (it remained acting as a 12V power hub, though). This worked, but it left me with no way to power and control my dew straps. Thank goodness it was as dry as it was, dew prevention was not needed that night or the next. 

To confirm where the fault was, I ran a USB cable to the Powerbox but did not connect anything to its output USB ports. The same errors returned suggesting that simply having the Powerbox as an active USB device was enough to cause the problem. 

I've read that the Powerbox can be harmed by connecting a 12V input line to its Adjustable Voltage port, and I know I've done that at least once recently. The poor Powerbox may have run afoul of Stupid User Error and had finally given out at ISP. Bummer. 

Anyway, I was up and running again and was able to collect light frames for my Veil mosaic.  I got everything I needed for Panel 2 Friday night, along with luminance for Panel 3 and a full set of flat frames. Saturday night I collected RGB for panel 3, along with some frames for the odd object seen in Panel 6 data.

Here is the Panel 2 LRGB result (click to see 1/4 scale version):

Panel 2 (NGC 6974, 6979, Pickering's Triangle, and the northern tip of NGC 6960)

Here is Panel 3: 

Panel 3 (NGC 6995, IC1340, and the Southern Knot) 

I've started to work on the full mosaic and noticed that my Panel 1 luminance frames were badly flatted and need to be reshot. If I can manage that this week, next time I'll have a first attempt at the full Mosaic!