Since another clear night, I wanted to try the ZWO camera with the Meade ETX. There was a slight breeze which made it more comfortable and keep away the mosquitoes.
I setup the power for the laptop and the DC adapter for the ETX. I went to plug in the ZWO camera but it wasn’t detected by the laptop. Then I remembered that I only installed SharpCap and forgot to install the camera drivers. Simple fix.
I decided to try the moon since it wasn’t fully dark. The moon was very large in the preview in SharpCap which was great. The electronic focuser on the ETX was nice but never really got a crisp image of the Moon. I would see the wavy appearance. Not sure if the hot night or the fact I was at the driveway but still learning a lot. I also realized I had forgotten all the settings for SharpCap. I just set to auto and hoped. I tried the Barlow too but it got way darker. Not sure if I can fix in the SharpCap settings so something to try at a later time.
I then went to fine Saturn. It was a very frustrating effort and took forever. I realized the finderscope wasn’t aligned correctly. I tried to compensate but swapping out different eyepiece but then realized that the higher magnification of the ZWO camera meant I needed to be perfect in the eyepiece before swapping with the camera. A couple of time I got close but then realized the exposure setting on SharpCap might not be helping. I had just set to auto. Finally, I noticed a donut and thought maybe I wasn’t in focus. But, we I focused, it move the telescope enough that Saturn moved. I went through this back and forth for a long time until I finally got lucky and got an image of Saturn in SharpCap. I was able to manually move the telescope once I realized the slowest setting was too slow for the actual motion of Saturn. I was able to get a few images but there would be no way to experiment with SharpCap settings. I then realized I needed to have tracking turned on by the telescope and thus need to have aligned it. It is all making sense and I guess trying makes you realize how much more you need to do. But, again, learning a lot.
I decided to try Mars next. It was slightly easier to get it into the SharpCap preview. I played around with the gain setting and got it to be sort of red but realized never going to get anywhere without tracking so just called it a night.
All the images can be found on the wiki at https://clearskytonight.com/wiki/July_26,_2018.
