"If it's not one thing, it's another..."

06/13/2024. This has been a Rosanne Rosannadanna kind of day. All at once, in the middle of a perfectly good capture, the image froze and nothing I tried would get data flowing again. I thought the USB port on the computer had crapped out. No, a portable SSD worked fine. Well, then maybe the camera has gone south. No, the desktop can see it just fine. How about the USB3 cable? No, it works in other combinations. Nothing's changed, but suddenly we have no bananas.

Software? Well, maybe. I guess. I mean, what's left? I downloaded and installed FireCapture 2.7, a distribution copy rather than the beta I have used without issue for a long, long time. And suddenly everything worked (a good many customizations need to be redone, but things worked). I got today's data while dodging clouds and moving the kit to avoid overhanging treelimbs. Then I realized that I'd actually built my shortcut to launch an old v2.6 FireCapture rather than the latest and greatest. Tomorrow will be an interesting day. In the meantime:

 

Nothin' to it, right? Best 200/500 times four. Photomerged, then
pseudo-flatted, smart sharpened, and stretched.

Best 200 of 1,000.

 

Because people like color.

 

Not bad through high haze. No flares at the moment. 200 :: 2,000.
Was my 2,000-frame clip too short, or did I miss the focus just a bit?

 

Today's scare was a software issue, but it has inspired some Billy Ray Williams Strain Relief Efforts for the USB3 cable where it attaches to the ASI178MM and for the mount's small USB power input. Neither effort is complete, but both are better than nothing. I'm still considering how to do something similar on the Toughbook's USB3 port -- the need to open water-resistant hatches over each port makes it challenging to come up with strain relief strategies that are effective and still packable. In other housekeeping, I applied loctite to the bolt that holds the Williams Optics alt-az adapter to the Linhof plate. It had worked loose and made it all too easy to ruin polar alignment by accidentally torquing the adapter in azimuth. And I added some tilt to the anti-Newton's rings device while I have everything apart because some of Isaac's interference fringes have been plaguing some of my wide-field solar efforts.

Because I am paranoid, I plugged everything up to make sure it runs. I set a few defaults in FireCapture v2.7, but I am sure there will be more.

 

06/14/2024. That went well. The full-disk image, not so much. Didn't allow enough overlap and missed the focus. But everything else is good. Have a look. Click anything. And if you want the techbits, I can look 'em up in the FireCapture log files and the filenames of the full-rez .TIFFs. Nothing out of the ordinary: best 200 of one or a few thousand frames (except best 50 of 500 for the color one). Photoshop, ImPPG, then more Photoshop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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