My Fine New Robot – Vespera is Here

My Vespera smart telescope arrived yesterday 14 months after I ordered it. It’s all assembled so the only thing i had to do was charge it and update the software. I took it out last night for a spin – just put it on the patio, levelled it, and let it initialize. It took two tries and probably 10 minutes to figure itself out.

I took two shots – M51 and M64. M51 because it was well positioned and M64 because i had not captured it before.

The M51 shot is pretty spectacular to me – especially compared to earlier efforts. It took 180 10 second shots for a total of 30 minutes and stacked them in the telescope.

My best previous effort was grainy because it’s only 8 shots. 75 second exposures at ISO 800 through the William Optics z61 so 360mm, f/5.

M64 wasn’t as well positioned and is not as spectacular as the whirlpool in any event. I only let it run for 20 minutes just to bag the Messier number.

Grainy M51 Short Shot

This is M51 and NGC5195. It’s grainy because it’s only 8 shots. 75 second exposures at ISO 800 through the William Optics z61 so 360mm, f/5.

I’ve cropped it to be similar in size to a shot i did through the takumar lens around this time last year. The Takumar shot (below) is a single exposure because i hadn’t discovered siril yet.

Shaving the Yak

Generally crap results last night but I did make some basic progress.

I can reliably connect to the mount from windows with a batch script that deletes the connection and restablishes it
I can set the camera to taking small-ish jpegs for doing the polar alignment then have backyardeos switch to high-res for imaging
I can use a filter ring to stop the Takumar 200mm lens down to 37mm which is about f/5.6. This seems to reduce, if not eliminate the severe chromatic aberration i was seeing with it.
From my side-yard I have a smallish slice of unobstructed sky but i have a good view of Polaris and the Zenith.

Aside from that it was a sh*tshow with false starts and loose clutches stopping me doing any real imaging. Wednesday night is supposed to be clear and i’ll try to do my prep in advance and get a solid couple of hours outdoors.

A Messier Evening

M51 is the whirlpool Galaxy. 23 MILLION light years away! It’s much prettier than my sad blur above but i’m delighted to have found and photographed it. The smaller blur on the left is NGC5195.

I took a number of exposures at 180 seconds, f/8, ISO 800 with a Takumar 200mm lens. I tried combining them with DeepSkyStacker but didn’t see any improvement. The image seems quite noisy and the stars are artifacted so if i’m out tonight i’ll try f/4 ISO 400 and maybe 240 seconds. I’ll also try 60 seconds.