Beta 6.0 NGC 891

[Jim McMillan]

There's nothing particularly unique about this image - other than to say that it was acquired with ACP Beta 6! I'm posting it just for fun since there haven't been many images posted lately. (33 x 10 min; star spikes are added by software)

A couple of notable things:

1) NGC 891 happens to be one of the targets where the focus star (findbrightstar) selects a bad (undocumented double) in the GSC catalogue. I was able to identify the bad star and put it into the "BadBrightStars.txt" file. ACP recognized the bad star and selected another one (new 6.0 feature).

2) For some weird, unknown reason, MaxIm "held" one exposure in the camera buffers about 40 seconds after the exposure was done. The effect is the image won't calibrate properly because all the extra time it sits in the camera, it gathers more noise which won't get dark-subtracted out.

3) For some weird, unknown reason, a couple of minutes before reaching the meridian, the scope decided to slew a few degrees to the east. The result was that when ACP initiated the flip procedure, the mount didn't flip (because it hadn't reached the meridian yet). The mount was lost. The mount did flip a few exposures later, but the mount was still lost. Once I stopped and restored proper pointing, things ran fine thereafter.

4) I did have one guiding incident where, between exposures, the mount moved such that the star was about 6 arcsec off where it had been once guiding restarted. Fortunately, the guide star got recentered back to where it belonged at the 19th guide cycle retry. I have no idea what caused that to happen.

5) For me, this was the first time using MaxIm 5.x (5.12). I don't know what to attribute these 3 glitches to - MaxIm or hardware. I'm sure it's not ACP though.

6) I discovered and already reported in the hardware section that the AP driver may have up to a 5 second delay after a slew before properly reporting the pierside.

All in all, not a bad result for the first time out with a new version of MaxIm and beta ACP software!

Jim