Beautiful night last night! Very clear, very steady seeing. the Milky Way was quite noticeable where I decided to set up, kids in tow. The plan was for the kids to help me with some imaging. The target? M8. Easy enough, and the kids would see some rapid results as we shot the individual frames.We were going to have a good night out!
Then, I had issues aligning my CGEM. When it came to Polar Alignment, I was seeing an error message I hadn't noticed before. No worries, I just turned it off and turned it back on again. Alignment worked fine after that. I went to set up the guiding system with PHD, and for whatever reason, started seeing pulse guiding issues. Then I couldn't get an image from my DSI to the PHD software, so guiding was impossible. Finally, after about an hour, the PHD software and Meade DSI were talking to each other. But, after taking a few test shots, the images were streaking. No idea what caused the issue, and by this time I was too frustrated to dive into it further.
So, I took advantage of the clear skies and gave my kids a lesson in ancient astronomy! We picked out some constellations, talked about the mythology behind them as well as what the ancients used to think of the night skies way back then.
Despite being frustrated with my astrophotography issues under such lovely sky conditions, it was nice to hang out with the kids and connect under the stars.
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