Posted by 21 May, 2020
The goals were to measure the pixel spacing and performance of the two cameras. The ASI120MC-S with the Orion Guide Scope and the NexImage 5 with the Celestron 5i.
The plan was:
- Level tripod
- Rough polar alignment
- Perform two-star alignment
- Get everything focused
- Get guiding working
Focus was performed on a bright star using FWHM tool on SharpCap. ~5.4 pixels which is around 2.054″ (based on later measurements).
The Bahtinov mask tool is not all that great.
M51 shows up nicely in the Orion guidescope.
M80 shows up good too.
Send images to nova.astrometry.net in order to get the image scale factors.
The guide scope ASI camera looks pretty good, but the Neximage had a hard time against any DSOs.
But it was solvable for Astrometry.
Guiding didn’t work probably because I was using Stellarium and PHD2 to talk to the telescope. I was able to use the ST-4 port on the Celestron using the ASI to drive it.