I found a new mistake

[Baurice]

When I was a teenager(1970's), we use to take photos 1 hr long on film, camera piggybacked on small scopes. The mount had a worm drive but no motor just a flexible cable and you had to sit there freezing cold looking at an out of focus star on a crosshair and slowly slowly turning the manual drive handle for an hour to keep the star in the cross hair.

One night, at -3C, my friend Peter spent one such hour meticulously guiding his scope through one such exposure. At the end of the hour he released the cable release to close the shutter. No sound? He checked the camera and found its shutter speed wasn't set to bulb but rather to 1/125s.

Joe

Yes, a common one is not to check the settings that were set at the last session. I have tried to do deep sky photos with 1/1000 second exposure and ISO 100 that I've used for lunar or solar.

[Graeme1858]

My imaging targets tend to be chosen by those that fit in my field of view but I had a go at Mars last week, so I set up, balanced and aligned using the new ASI294. Found Mars and was reminded Mars was just a dot with this camera! Changed the camera to the Altair GP Cam 290C, rebalanced, put on the bat mask and refocused. Still a bit small so I took out the camera, put on a focal reducer, put on the bat mask, refocused, scratched my head, then remembered I should have used a Barlow! Took out the camera, took off the focal reducer, put in a Barlow, put on the bat mask, refocused. Then the clouds came over!

Put everything away and went in.

Regards

Graeme

[XCalRocketMan]

During the "Great American Solar Eclipse" in SC I left the white light solar filter on my GT102 and lost about 10 frames of the diamond ring effect - doh!

[bestwork1989]

Hi
There are so many things involved in imaging there is bound to be an occasional blip. you have to more search on google on it and We've all made the more common mistakes that killed a session. but don't worry, keep it up.

[UlteriorModem]

Set up a sequence the other night.

Contained 5 targets. 3 of the 5 targets had at least 2 panel mosaics. Set the slew and center, set the start / end times, set the number of frames, set the output directory. Expected at least 10 hours worth of imaging.

Often if the target is a single pane I will just put 100 frames in the counter. Which works fine. IF you remember to check the boxes next to the start end times. Which I somehow overlooked.

Ended up with like 50 frames of the first target until it tried to track below the horizon then just parked!

I even went back and double checked the sequence and still over looked those check boxes.

SGP is great for sequence automation, but yea there are a lot of ways to trip up. Have gotten into the habit of double checking the sequence. Then again later before sequence start checking it all again.