09/25/2006 Never Let the Smoke Out of Your Equipment!

Amateur Astronomy sure provides me with a lot of crazy adventures. There are nights when everything seems to click, and then there are the other nights when I wish I would have left the gear alone and enjoyed my pillow instead. Saturday night was one that probably leans toward the latter.
I drove up to the Vekol Road site on Saturday afternoon with my friends Larry and Dean. It was new moon and Vekol Road is far enough out to have pretty dark skies (although Phoenix casts a substantial light dome to the North). My plan was to continue testing different spacing arrangements using some T-thread adapters lent to me by "the other Dean", owner of Starizona. I figured that would take me a couple of hours, then I'd spend the rest of the night taking some nice image data.
I managed to set up with only one injury, a pinched finger that throbbed a little but no big deal. But the spacing tests just didn't work out too well. It seems that nothing I do allows the 0.8 focal reducer/field flattener to achieve a nice flat field, in fact I actually get a more flat field by not using the reducer. So my thinking now is that something is wrong with the reducer. During the testing I took some pictures of NGC 891, the picture above is a cropped portion of the clear filter data. Since I was removing the camera a lot, I wound up forgetting to take calibration flats, so this didn't come out too good.
Meanwhile I ended up losing a tiny screw that holds the camera's "D-block", not an easy thing to find in the dirt in the middle of the night! I can still use the camera without it but one more minor nuisance...
So finally, somewhere around midnight I decided to just give up on the spacing and work on some data collection. I grabbed some data on my variable star project (RX And) and then went over to the Pleiades. Unfortunately I wound up having power problems again, my laptop is just such an energy hog that batteries started running out. Larry and Dean both pitched in with various extra batteries and cords, it almost seemed like some kind of telescope emergency room for a while as we frantically tried to prevent the scope, camera, or laptop from dying in the middle of an image. Finally I decided that I needed to disconnect the external guide camera and switch to guiding with the internal chip. BIG mistake. I unplugged the guider cable from one camera, moved it to the other, and...Larry says, "Uh-Oh, I smell smoke"! I also smelled it and quickly shut things down. It turns out I fried something inside a small unit that attaches to the camera, fortunately the camera itself and the telescope seem to have survived. At this point I was rather frustrated and since I had no way to connect the guide cable, I decided it was time to throw in the towel and call it a night. It was about 4:30 a.m. anyway so morning was near. But again, I didn't get any flat data for the Pleiades images which means I have several hours of good data that can't be properly calibrated.
Despite all this, I did enjoy meeting some new friends, hanging out with others, and seeing a brilliant Milky Way with nicely contrasted dark lanes spreading across the night sky. The technology may not always work perfectly, but the universe really does not care, and the wheel in the sky just keeps on turning away.