Getting to the bottom of the case…

I went back out to the SHSU Observatory last night to take advantage of the clear skies and absence of moon. Instead of the EON 130mm APO, I decided to test out the SBIG Canon EF adapter on the STF-8300M and see how it worked out. I hadn’t balanced and shot with the side-by-side saddle in a long time, so there was some risk in making my already marginal tracking worse with a balance issue, but I was hoping the faster f/4 aperture of my EF 600mm f/4L IS lens would improve the amount of signal I could pack into a short night out. With AP, nothing goes exactly as you planned most of the time… and last night didn’t disappoint. The mystery fuzzy/focus/dew problem came back even though I had used the heat of the entire day to ensure I was synchronized with the ambient temperature. I tried modifying the set point cooling (again) thinking that might help, but it didn’t do much. Then, I had a eureka moment. I noticed that if I spun the FW8-8300 to the empty slot, I could image a relatively crisp starfield… but if I took sample shots on any other filter setting (R, G, B, LP, Ha, OIII, SII), I was in the fuzzies. It was the filters that were dewing out! (or so it seemed)… gah! Now what? Fortunately, Dave was there and had an extra long velcro dew strip that I wrapped around the protruding section of the FW8-8300 and cranked up on the max setting. After some time, that seemed to help. It will take another night of imaging to really test if this is “the fix” for dealing with the extreme Texas summer humidity. By the time I troubleshot and quasi-corrected the issue, it was after 11 and I’d lost a good chunk of my short night. Another silly mistake where I had not noticed a deselection of auto-save subs in TheSkyX caused me to lost about half an hour of great blue channel subs that I had to re-do. All said, I ended up staying later than I should have and didn’t get home, unpacked, showered, and in bed until 6:15. Sleep fast!

NGC 7023