PeterH pls explain again how you use your own V-Curve. How do you create it and how do you deal with it in the
a) middle of the night, if you are sleeping
Hi Peter,
I don't do astronomy when I am sleeping. Habit from my days of actually looking through a telescope's eyepiece. IMHO, you really cannot enjoy astronomy or instrumentation if all you do is tell a computer to make exposures for you and then leave the telescope alone. Watching how things work is one of my enjoyments in this hobby (started when I ground my first 5" mirror in high school back in 1963).
When you change a filter of a different thickness, you need to go outdoors to change the backfocus anyway, if the filter is located between a flatterner/reducer and the sensor - you have to be awake if your filters do not have the same thickness.
You cannot sleep through a filter change if you are not using a Petzval scope. Even with a Petzval, if you have a flattener or reducer, like the 1.01x flattener on my FSQ-85, you still need to change the backfocus.
if the temperature changes
This one is simple. I use a ∆EAF vs ∆T curve for temperature changes (which the FSQ needs every 0.5ºC). Since there is no need to change backfocus, this can be done from indoors.
I have an FOA60Q (not the FS60Q, like you), but I only use that for solar work. We don't really need such high quality optics for H-alpha solar, but I just wanted to own the commercial scope with the best Strehl ratio. I have stack of two 60mm Lunts to go with it.
are you still fine with the ASI AIR or what do you think of stellar mate?
I use ASIAIR and Stellarmate when I am lazy, and I write my own macOS code to work with INDIGO Sky on a Rasberry Pi. I am planning to load INDIGO into a Mac Mini M1 that I have modified for 12V (added a buck boost converter after removing the 110 volt power supply). Because Peter Polakovic is a Mac nut (he even bought a Mac Studio before I bought mine), INDIGO is perfect for people who use Xcode and Objective-C (I retired from Apple in 2005). My All-sky telescope is a complete INDIGO setup (Ethernet PoE), also with my own code.
Stellarmate user experience has improved quite a bit after they intoduced the iOS app. So, somewhere between ASIAIR and INDIGO, IMHO. Not as brain-dead as ASIAIR, and not as flexible as INDIGO.
I am licensed for INDIGO A1, but don't really use it, since I use INDIGO primarily to develop and test some of own algorithms.
how can a perfect evening using the ASI AIR look like ?
Not too bad if you have been doing astrophotography for a long time. ZWO takes too many ignorant short cuts, and I pity the beginners who don't know how to work around the simplistic stuff and default settings. The biggest downside is it does not support any quality devices. It only supports the cheap ZWO devices. Its support of PHD2 sucks, but I do get consistent 0.35" RMS type autoguiding with my RST-135e.
I also do not use auto meridian flip by the way, nor any "auto" in ASIAIR (like auto centering). All the "auto" stuff from ZWO are complete nonsense junk, with zero understanding of celestial mechanics, and time keeping.
Chen
