Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing…
It was a nice clear night and even though it was a school night I decided to set up for a bit to try out using the Ekos Scheduler to kick off all the different tasks for an imaging session. I have…
My Celestron Advanced-GT EQ5 mount has served me very well for many years… but I am ready for an upgrade. I have been looking at Sky Watcher mounts for a while, and was thinking about either the HEQ5 Pro or the EQ6R…
Since Monday was a holiday I decided to get a bit of observing in. Sunday night was a clear cool night. The temperature when I started observing was around 40 degrees F but dropped down to near freezing. This session was a…
It has been cloudy, so I have been messing the with Raspberry Pi. I have a 64GB SD Card that I loaded up with the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS. No real need for 64-bit other than future proofing. I read somewhere that…
The Ekos Scheduler is primarily used for scheduling an automated Astrophotography session, but it can also help automate captures for EAA. This way you can spend less time setting up, or re-setting up, captures and more time observing and enjoying your live…
Last night I set up the gear and got things ready for the clear skies we are expecting this weekend. I wanted to test out the ZWO Electronic Automatic Focuser (EAF) focusing on the main scope using the Autofocus routine in the…
Dark frames, dark calibration frames, or simply darks are used to compensate for hot pixels, thermal noise, amp glow, and other camera sensor noise artifacts in images, especially in longer exposure images. Most EAA software can apply darks during a live stack…
Even though I have my gear set up to remotely operate the mount and cameras using Ekos/INDI there are several times during a EAA observing session where I am required to take a trip out to the scope. Whenever I need to…
I have had a few folks reach out and ask me about my workflow for capturing images with KStars/Ekos/INDI and then live stacking them using SharpCap for EAA. I am using Ekos to capture and save the FITS files to my local…
This post covers polar alignment (What and Why) and the process I use (How) to accurately polar align my Celestron Advanced GT equatorial mount using Ekos for EAA observing. The details of the process will vary for different mounts and different EAA…