Hi guys,
Yesterday I was not able to focus. There were relatively strong northern winds but nothing I haven't seen before, and the telescope was well protected (no shake at all).
I used the exact same equipment (178MM + VMC 110L) that I had used the night before yesterday, but things simply looked too fuzzy. When measuring with the Ekos Focus module, the best possible HFR was around 2.2 (usual value: 0.9 - 1.1) and when using a Bahtinov mask I could see the pattern having perfect symmetry except all spikes were fuzzy.
I thought the VMC was throwing a fit (perhaps it somehow became uncollimated) so I tried with my small 30/360 apo and the result was the same: the stars never stopped being fuzzy balls, at "sharpest" focus they were simply smaller fuzzy balls.
I also excluded the camera or the filter or the reducer having an issue by trying with another camera and all kinds of filters (or no filters) in front.
And I was able to focus closer than infinity, I picked a street lamp about 200m away and focusing was so sharp you could see the scratches on its pole.
So I am reasonably confident it wasn't my equipment.
My question is: is this a known thing? As far as I could tell the sky was very clear, stars were not twinkling, I could see quite a lot of asterisms with the naked eye and PHD on the small guiderscope was also recording fairly good SNR (in the 30s and 40s while 18-25 is more typical). Also this morning I was able to see the moon in the Western horizon with quite a lot of detail, until about 11 am actually. But my imaging telescope(s) just couldn't deliver anything better than fuzzy balls or fuzzy Bahtinov diffraction patterns.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
D.
Yesterday I was not able to focus. There were relatively strong northern winds but nothing I haven't seen before, and the telescope was well protected (no shake at all).
I used the exact same equipment (178MM + VMC 110L) that I had used the night before yesterday, but things simply looked too fuzzy. When measuring with the Ekos Focus module, the best possible HFR was around 2.2 (usual value: 0.9 - 1.1) and when using a Bahtinov mask I could see the pattern having perfect symmetry except all spikes were fuzzy.
I thought the VMC was throwing a fit (perhaps it somehow became uncollimated) so I tried with my small 30/360 apo and the result was the same: the stars never stopped being fuzzy balls, at "sharpest" focus they were simply smaller fuzzy balls.
I also excluded the camera or the filter or the reducer having an issue by trying with another camera and all kinds of filters (or no filters) in front.
And I was able to focus closer than infinity, I picked a street lamp about 200m away and focusing was so sharp you could see the scratches on its pole.
So I am reasonably confident it wasn't my equipment.
My question is: is this a known thing? As far as I could tell the sky was very clear, stars were not twinkling, I could see quite a lot of asterisms with the naked eye and PHD on the small guiderscope was also recording fairly good SNR (in the 30s and 40s while 18-25 is more typical). Also this morning I was able to see the moon in the Western horizon with quite a lot of detail, until about 11 am actually. But my imaging telescope(s) just couldn't deliver anything better than fuzzy balls or fuzzy Bahtinov diffraction patterns.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
D.
