Last night I just went for it despite the unfavorable skies. I had cloud patterns that were semitransparent, so for one thing ASTAP was finicky to solve.
Until I went back into my options in NINA and increased my exposure time for plate solving.
The obvious change brought out the stars much brighter in spite of varying cloud densities. And ASTAP solved and got to guiding. Ahhh!
Then PHD2 had its ups and downs with the varying clouds so I experimented with its exposure time as well.
The overall result was I was able to image, the subs look obviously not so good, but I’m running them in ASI Studio Deep Sky Stacking anyway just to see.
But things learned was increasing ASTAP’s exposure time definately helped it solve. So for questionable seeing nights it might help getting things working. My change was a jump from 2 seconds up to 10 seconds exposure. Just to experiment. PHD2 was from 1 second (my forever used exposure) to 3 seconds.
Normally, I would have just wrapped things up and called it a bad night. But decided to play around in spite of the drifting misty clouds. ASI Deep Sky Stacking seems to be straining with the subs, and I don’t expect anything from it. But it was fun to get ASTAP to do something beside “ASTAP Failed to solve…” Balogney.
I’ll burn holes in these coastal spring weather patterns yet. 🤣😉 (I’m 30 miles inland, on a Spir of the Mojave Desert. A hole in the sky normally.)
📷 NGC2064 Experiment
