M92

 07/13/2026 -- No moon, clear skies, great night for broadband imaging.  After prolonged spell with rain, clouds, hot temperatures (crazy hot), finally a night available with good skies.  Key issue -- trying to diagnose persistent problems guiding and imaging near the zenith.  

Did note that cables could be a problem. Placed a cable tie on the mount to try and relieve the strain from the combined weight of all the cables... but this tie may have (itself) caused strain if the cables were too short.  Lengthened the amount of cable available to see if this leads to any improvements.  

But the fundamental problem appears to be disagreement between Indi/Ekos and the CGEM hand controller on when a meridian flip is (or is not) needed. Possible settings changes to the hand controller?  Parameters involving Ekos for the HA limit?  Hard to say... another night to experiment.

Set the camera chiller to 5C.

Seeing forecast for 07/13-14/2026 from meteoblue (top) and cleardarkskies (bottom) suggesting a very clear night for observations.

Initial polar drift alignment showed a relatively modest error of ~6' (given how long the mount sat out unused). Turned the azimuth adjustment wheel to the left. Overcompensated. A lot.  -10.  Back to the right. Then -6.  More to the right. Finally, ~0.5'. Alignment completed around 22:26.  Set up the scheduler for M92 and then NGC 6888 (starting at 01:30).

At this point, the Indi Allsky backyard camera reported a jSQM (pseudo sky quality metric) of ~5177 (not terrible) and the Weewx outdoor weather station reported conditions as:

"time": "2026-07-13T22:25:00-0400",
"temperature": {"value": 73.01515151515152, "units": "°F"},
"dewpoint": {"value": 60.51258338751394, "units": "°F"},
"humidity": {"value": 64.93939393939394, "units": "%"},
"heat index": {"value": 73.0688181818182, "units": "°F"},
"wind speed": {"value": 0.0, "units": "mph"},
"wind gust": {"value": 0.0, "units": "mph"},
"wind chill": {"value": 73.01515151515152, "units": "°F"}

Ultimately, only the M 92 task in the scheduler executed.  NGC 6888 never collected light frames successfully.  The PHD2 external guider likely disconnected shortly after 12:40 and did not reconnect.  Since guiding did not start successfully, no light frames were collected.  This motivates more work tuning parameters for the internal guider.

Ekos Analyze tab for collection over 07/13-14/2026 showing initial collection of M 94 light frames (with a guiding drop out for nearly ten light frames) followed by a lack of guiding for the rest of the night and no further successful light frame collections for NGC 6888...likely due to PHD2 disconnecting inexplicably.

Indi Allsky backyard camera metrics for 07/13-14/2026 showing outstanding skies all night with relatively high star counts (top, white) and pseudo sky quality metrics (jSQM, red, bottom) near 4000 (good skies) all night.

Outdoor weather station measurements for 07/13-14/2026 for humidity (top), temperature/dew point and wind showing a strong likelihood of dew forming overnight but otherwise no wind and relatively stable temperatures.

07/14/2026 -- An additional night of no moon and cloud-free skies.  Should be clear skies except for smoke from Canadian wildfires.  :<   

Seeing forecast for 07/14-15/2026 from meteoblue (top) and cleardarkskies suggesting few / no clouds and no moon.

Set up the scheduler with M 92 and NGC 6888 again.  Ran for 40 minutes unattended (took kids to mall) but found that no light frames were collected.  Performed an initial polar drift alignment and found error of ~13'. Turn to the left. Brought this down to 1.67' (called it good).  Threw out / cleared internal calibration data..forced a re-calibration.  Ran the internal guider for a bit...adjusted the RA to use the GPG algorithm.  Restarted the scheduler...