iHopes, cont'd

2026/01/13. The Wave 100i, iPolar, SynScanPro, and PHD2 work nicely together, but it may be important to load, use, and close iPolar before proceeding with the happy business of imaging. Something interfered with something and made connections troublesome. With iPolar out of the way, PHD2 connected the ASI120MM guide camera and the Wave100i cleanly and undramatically. Tonight I did the polar alignment, closed and unplugged iPolar, then restarted the computer before finding targets, calibrating guiding, and making pretty pictues. Rebooting might be overkill, but it worked. The Toughbook only takes several seconds to cycle, and after that it's all good -- so no big deal. Play around and see.

Last night, I did a couple of images (Double Cluster and M35). Each is interesting for its own reasons. I forgot to mount the counterweight on the Wave 100i for the former. The 400mm and Canon R6 weigh about 18 pounds, just under the mount's stated 22 pound unbalanced limit. The kit worked well enough, but guiding errors were amplified, maybe by the imbalance, maybe by something else. A stack of 231 30-second exposures of M35 cleanly resolved NGC 2158 and hints at dark lanes lacing the field. I'm taking more data tonight to try to bring out the dark features. (They resisted.)

I left it all tracking just fine but when I checked on it two hours later, the camera aimed 30 degrees south of M35. Nothing binding, no meridian flip, power supply is at 13.1v. WTF? I reaimed (routine), and restarted guiding (also routine).

It would be nice to set up a connection so I can monitor things from in here. I did that clumsily back in the day. Surely Win10 offers a better way these days. Watch and learn, and give something like this a try when you feel as if you can handle a wholesale pack of frustration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7AN64i26os. Or, y'know, give an ASIAir, StellaVita, etc another go and use it in station mode.

2026/01/14. If you do "meta-stacks" as I did with M33 and as I just tried with M35, it's well worth aligning the n-image stacks with one another after integrating them even if all the data was originally aligned to the same subframe. Let me 'splain. I've been grouping files for which I have or intend to do a ton of subs into substacks of (say) 50 images, the better to add more data whenever it's available without having to store and process a massive stack of files to accommodate each addition. I've been aligning each stack on a single selected subframe. I thought that would insure that I could just integrate the n-image integrations into a fuller integration without further ado. But it's apparent from my M35 stacks (about 50 each, from 001 to 389) that the 8 constituent substacks produce smeared stars if I don't explicitly align the substacks with one another. That step is the cure. I'm thinking this is down to slight differences in distortion correction between the stacks, but I'm not convinced I know what's happening here.

Bluff called: an eBay member in Albuquerque offered a 6mm F2.8 AstrHori fisheye at a significant discount. What's changed to allow AstrHori to make this lens for $300 retail when Nikon's classic version is both huge and hugely expensive (it's the size of a mixing bowl, and used examples go for $30-100k)?

And while we're budgeting, I'm still thinking about an ASIAir Mini or Plus or some as yet determined alternative. If a key concern right now is portability, the laptop and its table are a fair fraction of the burden, and if it would make monitoring and remote operation from the desktop easier... better. Thinking.

2026/01/18. PS Polar Align for iPhone/iPad. Why didn't I know about this app years ago? I've ordered a couple of very short Vixen rails to make a bracket (or brackets) to hold the iPad Mini 4 (former drone control tablet resurrected just to run this). I need to isolate the tablet from the magnetic bits of the SWSA and Wave 100i in order to do solid daytime polar alignment, and I have ideas about how to make that routine, repeatable, and reliable. They're not subtle, but it takes too many words to describe what I have in mind. Just stay tuned, and I'll show you.

The 6mm AstrHori is here and it is a hoot. And yes, it IS hard to use without including my knuckles, the camera strap, my belly, and my feet. There are ways. It arrived one day too late to try under last night's expected aurora, but then again, the expected aurora broke early over Europe and left only pale dregs for North America.

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