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:
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| 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!
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| "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.
