The person writing this blog is stupid

Where do I start? 

I guess with this picture.  So, I've been shooting with the QHY 462C for the last two nights.   I was sorta complaining to Anthony that the seeing hasn't been great because it's that situation where the image of Mars (or Jupiter, etc) might be relatively still but lacks detail and contrast.   I've conjectured that there might be dust or some sort of high-altitude turbulence that doesn't really manifest itself as shaking but just poor detail.   While I hold that the latter still might be the case, when I decided to shoot IR Mars to get a little more detail, I found the above case holding a filter.  It took me awhile to register what I had seen.

The first mistake I made was that I took out the Methane filter thinking it was the 850nm+ long pass filter.  No big deal, I took 5 x 3 min shots of Mars in Methane and I think I was shooting around 24 fps because the filter is basically narrowband, letting in very little light.

Now, IF I had been shooting the last couple days with the UV/IR filter on, I would have had to remove it to shoot in Methane.  I just screwed on the Methane filter and started shooting.   Now, when I went back inside to get the 850nm longpass filter, I noticed the UV/IR case above was holding a filter.   Huh?  

At that moment, I realized that I had been shooting without the UV/IR filter for the past two days collecting at least 700 GB of data on Mars and Jupiter.  What?!?!   Without the UV/IR filter, everything is washed out and slightly out of focus.  

The other thing that didn't register was that I wasn't seeing any cloud detail on Mars and the south polar cap was non-existent most of the time.  

What to do with all this bad data?  😨😨

(Later: Glancing at older footage of Mars through the 462C, it seems obvious there were times I did NOT use the UV/IR filter.   Holy crap.)

I started this evening with a cheap cooling solution consisting of a bag of ice on the back of the OTA.  I let it cool for about 40 minutes in this configuration.

Looks like my telescope had a hangover from the previous night of "bad seeing", ie shooting without the UV/IR blocking filter.  The reason I set up so early was to catch Jupiter showing the red spot.  In my dozen attempts this season, I've either missed the red spot or it revealed itself in awful seeing conditions.  

When I started shooting Jupiter there was a lot of turbulence.  The back plate of the SCT was much colder than any other part of the OTA.  I think it would have been better to have not used ice at all or just let it cool the back for maybe 15 minutes total.  The metal on the front of the scope (around the corrector) was easily 5-6 degrees warmer than the back.

Because I dropped and broke my 2x Televue barlow yesterday (sigh), I had to use the Siebert barlow which has tons of dust and tiny particles in it.  (Poor QA) Before I started to shoot Jupiter, I had to create a flat.   Because I felt rushed (and this a big reason why I dropped the barlow), didn't use my spike-a-flat light source.  Instead I had the lame idea of using the quickly darkening sky.  But the sky was pretty dark 15 minutes after sunset.  When I pointed the telescope up and adjusted shutter speeds and gain, I found that I had to use a lot of gain to get the histogram in a good place.  I had done this exact same thing the previous day and while the flat worked somewhat, it probably only calibrated out the dust squiggles and donuts by 50%.   Also, it turns out that my exposures for the flat were so noisy that the applied flat actually added more noise to the images.

Anyways, for the past two days, the neighbors have been out late with their floodlights and deck party lights.

 

 

While you can see stars, it's just blinding to look in this direction at night.  It's like living next to a car dealership.

 

 

On the other side of the yard, there's this lovely image every night now.  The trees create a large diffuse fan of light that makes it easy to read by.   Two nights ago, these assholes left this floodlight on all night. 

So just to be clear, you reneged on a promise to pay half for the fence and now you fucking keep your lights on all night. 

Thanks neighbors.  Glad that you live in a place where you can see the Milky Way on most nights... wait, Milky Way?   What's that?

Oh and then this happened the same night...