Cold as ice

The other night my SBIG STT8300 saw first photographic light. It sat idle in its Pelican case for a few months since the day I acquired it - the duration of our move to a new house. Finally the skies briefly cleared, there was a supernova in M82. I rushed the Celestron VX mount and Takahashi FSQ106ED into the observatory (having not yet received the big equatorial). I aligned the mount using the controller and its excellent built-in polar alignment routine. Which turned out fine, till
 I incidentally hit the mount tripod in the darkness of the night. Oh well, life's too short to bother about a tad of misalignment. Exact polar alignment only happens to nerds. I hope to graduate a junior nerd in the near future.

The SBIG STT8300 is a deeply cooled monochrome CCD camera, and mine is equipped with a self-guiding filterwheel with LRGB and S2, O3 and Ha filters in front of the sensor. Self-guiding in the sense it features a small pick-up prism in front of the filter wheel to redirect some light onto a second, small CCD chip. The camera is intelligent enough to work in concert with a software program to hold the stars perfectly still, by sending control signals to the mount in near real-time correcting for bad polar alignment (if you don't exaggerate that is) or less than perfect mechanics (as is the case with any cheapish mount and some of the more expensive too).

I had installed the camera software months ago and updated the SBIG drivers for the device, I thought. I couldn't get to start Software Bisque's CCDsoft to control the camera without errors, but with the time constraints of renovating a house in mind, I just postponed further investigation of the issue. And it bit me - hard.

The sky would only be clear for a few hours on February 3, so I connected the SBIG to the FSQ106ED and using the GoTo controller steered the scope towards M81 and M82. Camera settled at a nice -20 degrees of temperature in the meantime. Didn't want to push it deeper for this short session in 2x2 binning mode of the chip. As I remembered the trouble I had with CCDsoft, I installed a test version of Maxim/DL, a very complete image capturing and processing program. Amongst other features, it allows one to program sequences, automating exposure duration, which filters to use and number of exposures for each filter. When taking test exposures I received the dreaded 'Filterwheel Error' message. I had heard about it before, and seen it myself months ago, while installing the camera.

A retry after the error worked out ok. So I launched a long sequence, lasting nearly 60 minutes hoping all would be fine. Not so. When I came back into the observatory after 30 minutes, the camera was found jammed on a filter change. Unattended photography was out of the question for the night. In the end, before the clouds rolled in, I managed to grab just enough images to produce the following picture of galaxies M81 and M82. By far not enough (color) data to make it a pretty picture, but at least the supernova is visible.

The next day I launched a support request at both SBIG and Cyanogen. They were both very helpful and asked me whether I had installed the most recent SBIG drivers. Of course I had done that, I mean the DriverCheckerUtility does that, everyone knows. What may not be known to everyone, and I certainly missed it, was the restrictions brought by the enhanced security in recent versions of Windows. I had received a message during the driver installation stating DriverCheckerUtility couldn't install a certain driver file and yada yada yada. I never paid attention to it, assuming my PC was already up to date. It wasn't. I ran the utility as Administrator to force the install. Guess what. It worked and as a side effect CCDsoft came to live. Windows, it never ever works as it should, even when it works as it should.

Did I mention the FSQ106ED does the moon too? Here's one image made a few days later, with a Canon 6D, using a Televue 4x Barlow.