{"id":215,"date":"2015-07-20T13:52:45","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T19:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/?p=215"},"modified":"2015-07-20T13:52:45","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T19:52:45","slug":"getting-to-the-bottom-of-the-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/?p=215","title":{"rendered":"Getting to the bottom of the case&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">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&#8217;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&#8230; and last night didn&#8217;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&#8217;t do much. Then, I had a eureka moment. I noticed that if I spun the\u00a0FW8-8300 to the empty slot, I could image a relatively crisp starfield&#8230; 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)&#8230; gah! Now what? Fortunately, Dave was there and had an extra long velcro dew strip that I wrapped around the protruding section of the\u00a0FW8-8300 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 &#8220;the fix&#8221; for dealing with the extreme Texas summer humidity. By the time I troubleshot and quasi-corrected the issue, it was after 11 and I&#8217;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&#8217;t get home, unpacked, showered, and in bed until 6:15. Sleep fast!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><a style=\"color: #993300;\" href=\"http:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/iris.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-216\" src=\"http:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/iris-300x217.jpg\" alt=\"NGC 7023\" width=\"300\" height=\"217\" srcset=\"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/iris-300x217.jpg 300w, https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/iris-1024x741.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/iris.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t balanced and shot with the side-by-side saddle &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/?p=215\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Getting to the bottom of the case&#8230;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4P0Vj-3t","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217,"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/13thstone.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}