🐾BillinGlendaleCA
After returning from my hike up the North Fork of Big Pine Creek, I decided to stay at home and concentrate on fixing a long standing problem with my star tracker. I was getting star trails and my polar alignment was perfect. I removed my iPolar(a little camera that fits in my polar scope part of the tracker, connects to a computer and will polar align the mount) when the USB cable broke and didn’t realize at the time I needed to recalibrate it. I recalibrated it and I got much better tracking and continued to try to optimize that.
At the same time, I noticed that one of the tires on the Prius had a slow leak, so any distant treks were out until I could get that fixed. In early December, I was out in my yard shooting and the battery on my camera went dead during the shoot as well as the tracker. I went inside to plug in the tracker and the USB charging cable went into the hole and didn’t connect to anything.; moving the tracker, I heard something moving around inside. I took the tracker apart and the USB connector had fallen off the logic board. I now had no way to charge the tracker’s battery, so I had a brick.
My plans for 2024 included upgrading my mount to a Goto style mount and I had been looking primarily at the SkyWatcher Star Adventurer GTI. Suddenly my timeline was accelerated, I looked at the Star Adventurer azGTI but decided that the SA GTI was the better choice. When the price on Amazon dropped a week prior to Christmas, I ordered the mount. I used it for about a month and decided that I needed a better method of polar alignment, so I also got a mini computer to control the whole image acquisition process as well as a power bank to power everything.
The Orion nebula(M42) and the Running Man nebula shot using the old star tracker. This is a really easy target to shoot since you can actually see it even in light polluted skies.
On The Road – BillinGlendaleCA – Disaster!Post + Comments (19)