Goal -- The Heart Nebula, IC 1805

Setup: 

Orion ST80, Cosmicar 50mm, dual-narrow band filter, Astrodon clear EOS filter, CGEM DX, Odroid XU4, Canon T3I (astro modded) @ ISO1600 with day light white balance.  Set up in front yard. Huge nearly full moon... very clear skies with bright stars.

Setup: 7:30-8.  Initial polar alignment through polar scope as noted in Polar Alignment android app.

Polar alignment:

Started on the venerable HP Pavilion 17 (new SSD) with Fedora 32.

PHD2 drift alignment...

Verified guide scope focal length == 50mm in PHD2 (critical first step). Value was correct (pre-configured from Indy?)

Started by performing fresh calibration... telephone pole in the way... failed a number of times. Gave up & restored calibration & ran Guide Assistant.  GA showed initial polar alignment of 5.4 arc min (measured over 246s and 44 frames (sample count).

Drift alignement... Az:

1) Dec trending down... tightened left while watching through polar scope.  Looks far worse at 62.02 arc min.  Repointed the mount back towards the meridian.

2) Significant problems.  Unable to polar align.

3) 9:58.  Dec trending down.  Then...tried again...dec trending up.  Gave up.  Shutdown all software, restarted.  Reset PHD2 (all settings).  Started again.

4) 10:18.  Completed calibration successfully @ 10:30.  Began drift alignment again at 11:05. Drifting slightly up with polar alignment error of 8.53'. Slight adjustment tightening left knob. Results worse at 16'.  Readjusted by tightening the right... resulted in 0.87'.

5) 11:17. Slewed west for altitude adjustment. Result 1.76'.  Happy.

Focused, set up CCD (180s, ISO1600, local saves), scheduler for IC 1805.  Noted issues with guide RMS > 3.85"with deviations above 7" (preventing exposures from completing)...Adjusted exposure from 1s to 3s...problem solved.  RMS values under 2".

Ultimately, 56 lights collected from 12:56 to 04:28.

End result:  IC 1805 from 10/2 & 10/3


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