Mistakes I Make in Learning This Pursuit

Jerry Gerber:
Set up tonight, first time in over 3 weeks because rain, more rain, more rain and more rain.  Tonight not a cloud in the sky.  Decided to image the Heart Nebula at a focal length of 368mm and at f3.6.

First time using the reducer and wasn't sure my backfocus was going to work, but it's good, stars at edges are round and sharp.  But forgot to tell ASIAIR Plus that my new focal length is 358, not 550.  Oops, fixed that.    Took a long time to polar align, at least 15 minutes.  Refined my focusing again and started autoguiding.  But I forgot to take off the Bahtinov mask and couldn't figure out why my autoguiding was so crappy. Duh!!

Got that solved and now indoors while taking 145 100" subs.   Seeing is good.  Total guiding is less than .5".   Live and learn!

Am I shooting the heavens or am I in heaven?   Maybe both???

What mistakes have you learned from?

*** Pretty sure I've made every mistake I can think of... Wrong backfocus for sure, eq mount clutches/adjustment bolts not tight, incorrectly setup autofocus.... Etc

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My take away is to keep a journal of imaging sessions and including acquisition details as well as issues that cropped up and how they were fixed. 

***

If we cannot laugh at ourselves as we learn from experience, we definitely won't succeed!

Andrew Murrell:
Hello Jerry, and everyone else.
The weather in NSW Australia has been poor for so long now that you almost forget what the night sky looks like. 
I find I make different mistakes with different scopes. For instance, the LX200 10" is the first SCT scope I have owned. I keep forgetting to put the dew hood on the front. I get about 15 images into a 100 sub run and wham the front correct gets fogged over.  The 150ED is a long scope and I sometimes forget that the camera gets low and in some spots close to the tripod legs. I have discovered the scope run aground on several occasions. My backyard is a great sky about Bortle 4, but sometimes I like to shoot from a darker sky. I have access to a friend's property about 2hr drive from where I get to a Bortle 2. On more than one occasion I have driven out to shoot only to discover I have forgotten the Counterweights, the battery or some other essential item./
The fun part is getting under the sky and admiring the cosmos.

As a Sydneysider I feel the pain too.

About a year ago I travelled with my partner to her daughter's property in the NSW Central West, a Bortle 2 site. I was so excited until I got to the point in the set up when I turned my power station on ... I had forgotten to recharge it after the last session. A glorious evening looking at the pitch black sky, but alas no pictures.

That's really my only major mistake in about 18 months in this hobby, which petrifies me at the thought of what is still to come 😱

I think that we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves wrt mistakes.  When all is said and done -from hardware to software - ours really is an immensely technically dense hobby.  I can't think of an occasion when I haven't made at least one mistake during set up  – it is just the severity of the mistake and whether it is recoverable that varies.

It starts really with deciding what you want to image and what that means for where to place the telescope in the garden.  Easy one to get wrong when you are surrounded by trees and high buildings.

A case in point – my big 12 inch F4 Newtonian that I have just started using again.  Remembering how to get the 3D balance just so – how to slowly feed on the weights as you adjust it gradually towards 51.4 N with the clamps just tight enough to avoid slippage and stripping the threads in the mount.   Remember to unlock the mount so there is no damage to the sensors.  Oh heck -  Now I've forgotten the cabling which runs through the dovetail that has to go in before putting the telescope on the mount - so reverse everything -scope off -  cabling in - scope back on -  begin gradually winding back up to 51.4  - start doing the balancing  -  find that the scope needs to be slid back in the dovetail -  only safe to do when near the horizontal  - so back down again

And all that is before you have even begun recentering the secondary, collimation, polar alignment  etc, all while the mirror is gradually cooling down  and before sorting out the usual electronic shenanigans with com ports etc etc  until everything talks nicely to Sharpcap.

So finally - after about 4h - it all works and you are finding focus and starting imaging.  Looks great for an hour or so then you notice the image brightness has fallen off a cliff.  What did I forget?    Oh yes – don't use this scope when there is frost on the ground , no wind it is below zero and the humidity is > ~ 70%  ..the main mirror will frost up in no time

My big mistake was getting new equipment camera scope eaf setup and all working great for a night of imaging in the backyard.  In all the excitement did not turnoff the sprinkler only to wake-up the next morning to find the whole rig drenched 😭. Not a proud moment.  Will never make that mistake again.

Andy Wray:
For me:  if the tracking isn't working and the gotos don't seem to be working, then assume you messed up with setting up the scope/mount in the first place.  Reset immediately and start setting up again from scratch ... make sure everything is tightened down and that you have no cable snags; reboot everything and start from point one.

*** Ye, Ive defo had issues with cables dragging and RA/Dec clutches or adjustment bolts not tight. ***