EQ6R - Pro / ASIAir Pro | Full Workflow (Updated)

over the last four years i've done all of my astrophotography with the simple star tracker the sky guider pro but recently i've been able to use a go to mount these might seem a little intimidating at first i know i was a little bit afraid of it but after the last three nights i think i finally got a handle on it and i want to walk you guys through the entire setup process as you can see here i'm using the skywatcher eq6r pro mount if you have another type of go to mount that's okay you can still follow along just be aware there might be a few minor differences the first thing we want to do is connect the power cable and i've got mine right here i'm just going to plug it in right there where it says power 12 volt after i've got the power cable connected to the mount then i need to plug the 12 volt port into some type of external battery at this point i actually have two jackery batteries and i'm gonna plug them out into the larger jackery battery here the smaller one i'm gonna use that to power my asio pro now i realize there are more efficient ways to do this but i'm still just getting into this like i said i've only used them out for about three nights and for right now this works for me speaking of the asr pro let's get that one powered right now as well i've just got this sitting on a little tripod next to my big go-to mount again not the best setup but it works and over on the side here we have a little 12 volt input right there if you just got your asar pro you may also need to buy a special 12 volt cable which you can see right here this is one i bought off of amazon for about fifteen dollars and you'll see a screenshot of it here i'm gonna plug in one end though to my asar pro and then the large end is gonna go into my other jackery battery let's get back to the asar pro and talk about all the different connections we need to make if i turn this around you'll see that we actually have quite a few ports here on the side i've got two usb 3.0 ports and two usb 2.0 ports and for the 3.0 ports one you want to attach the flash drive that way you can save all your images to that flash drive and then the other usb 3.0 port is going to connect to your dedicated astro camera if you have one alternatively if you had a dslr and it's compatible with the iso you can plug it in there but for most of you hopefully you have a good dedicated astro camera which should give you great results so again we have plug in the one in there the other end of that cable is going to plug into the back of your camera next let's connect the auto guider cable to our asr pro in my case i've got the zwo 120 mini auto guider so i'm going to plug the one usb port into the asa are here and then the other end of that cable of course is going to go into the back of the auto guider there's one final usb cable we need to connect and we're going to plug it in here on the last available port on the asar pro after we plugged into the asr pro we're going to plug in the other end to our go to mount if you have the ability only some go to mounts have a usb port connection if yours does it's going to make your knight a lot easier for those of you using an electronic filter wheel like you see here make sure you plug in that usb cable to the back of your dedicated astro camera that's actually going to work just fine you also have a 12 volt power cable there on the right that's gonna power your dedicated astro camera's cooling system so you want to make sure you grab one of those power cables that would have come with the asr pro plug one into there and then over on the asar pro you've got four dc 12 volt output ports you can plug in your cooling cable to any of those four ports i usually plug it into port number one then you can use the other three for maybe an electronic focuser a dew heater or whatever else you might need the only cable left is the st4 cable and in fact you don't even need that anymore with a go to mount i want to thank everybody who mentioned that in the original edit of this video because we're using the asr pro and a go to mount all you need is a usb connection from the auto guider to the asr pro and you can do your guiding so that's a nice change the only thing missing at this point is the hand controller and thankfully we don't even need to worry about that for this workflow i'm going to show you a way to do everything through the asar pro today no hand controller required at this point in the video i'm just going to show you attaching my gear although really if you were doing everything step by step you would already attached all your gear and then go through the cables so this is a little bit out of order no big deal i'm assuming you know to obviously attach your gear first in this case i'm just making sure it's actually securely fastened because there's nothing worse than attaching it and then watching it slide to the ground and break speaking of which it's always a good idea to attach your counterweight before your telescope or camera if you try to attach a big heavy telescope before the counterweight it's possible that the mount will slip around and fall due to the uneven white balance and you could break your telescope again it's always a good idea to drag everything out in the backyard first attach the counterweight then after the counterweight is securely attached you can go ahead and add your camera and telescope to the top when you're securing your counterweight really make sure it's tight because i've noticed these kind of weights tend to slip a little bit more than i'm used to and obviously don't leave your foot right under there in case it does fall and while you're at it quickly attach the end cap that way if it does end up sliding it won't fall and crush your foot there we go we have one counterweight attached that's going to be more than enough for this setup now that we've securely attached all of our camera gear and the cables we can balance both our right ascension and declination axes this is the right ascension lever right down there that's gonna allow you to turn everything like you see there that's our right ascension the declination is going to be up here same thing you're going to loosen that lever and that's going to allow you to turn your camera and telescope all that kind of like left and right that's our declination axis again it's not really left and right but that's one way to think about it anyway here we can see the full process again at this point you should be aimed up towards polaris have done a rough alignment we're going to loosen our declination and our right ascension levers turn everything horizontally and watch what happens in this case my camera swung down like that very hard that means i'm back heavy i've got too much weight on the back of my telescope setup and it's pulling down so the way to fix that is to loosen these two big knobs here and slide everything forwards that way it's no longer back heavy when i rotate it back down to horizontal we can see that it's neither front heavy nor back heavy it's not pulling one way or the other so i've now balanced my declination axis and thankfully my right ascension access was already balanced you can see here neither the camera nor the counterweight side is pulling down that means the counterweight is in the right spot but if you notice once i was pulling down you just move the counterweight up or down to balance it out if you haven't done so already now would be a good time to go over to your batteries and turn them on that way you can turn on the mount and the asr pro that's all taken care of there now i can go to my mount hit the power switch on there and then go to my asr pro and hit the power switch on there as well this completes the beginning of our workflow from here we're going to do a polar alignment set up our auto run do our go to and a lot more again i'm assuming at this point you've already done a rough pull alignment just by looking over the top of your star tracker or in this case the go to mount and making sure you see polaris right over the top of it if you did that you're ready to go from here on out we're just going to be looking at my cell phone and i'm going to walk you through step by step what i did and we'll also talk about some of the nice features of a go to mount the first thing you want to do is go into your wi-fi settings and one of the problems i have with the asar pro it's not really the device's fault it's more my phone's fault it always tries to connect to the strongest wi-fi network in this case my home wi-fi even if it's way in the backyard so unfortunately what i have to do every night is forget my home network that way i don't run in any connection issues now i can connect to the asa or pro's wi-fi network if this is your first time connecting to the asar pro the password is one two three four five six seven eight by default then we can load up the asa or app on our phone and go through the initial setup this is really just going to depend on the specific mount you're using and today i am using the skywatcher eq6r pro but this is where it gets a little bit complicated because there's no option in the menu that says that so you have to get a little bit creative and i'll show you what i mean here in a second all right so here's our initial interface and there's a lot of information here the first thing to do is verify that your latitude and longitude is correct there on the left it should be as long as you have a gps connection even if you're on the middle of nowhere that should still be accurate the mount this is what i was getting at you have a lot of choices here in the past i was using on camera sd4 for my sky guider pro but because we now have a fancy go to mount i'm assuming you can choose from any of the options you see here maybe you have a celestron avx you can choose that in my case i would have thought to choose one of these skywatcher options way down here because i have a skywatcher mount and it gets a little bit confusing because there are so many choices because i connected my go to mount to my asar pro via that usb cable which i showed you earlier i'm actually going to choose either eq mod mount or eq mod with sky safari both of these are going to allow me to do everything in the asr pro without needing the hand controller and that's why i really love this workflow provided it works it does a great job and it really simplifies and speeds up the whole process for the purpose of this video i'm going to start off with eq mod with sky safari then i can move down and verify that the main scope and guide scope focal length are correct you don't want to apply any calculations to these use the exact focal length in my case the red cat is 250 millimeters but it automatically corrects it to 247 so i don't bother changing it my guide skill focal length is 120 millimeters and you'll see my main camera and guide camera have already been set everything looks good now i can hit enter this will bring us to the main user interface for the asr pro this is how we can access all the different functions including our polar alignment the guiding the go to and a lot more the first thing i want to look at is that little window over on the right this is basically going to replace your hand controller we can adjust the declination and the right ascension axes now this is a big change coming from a star tracker we have to move everything manually for the most part here i can just touch these buttons and slew my amount wherever i want to i can also adjust the speed to 800x that's going to make everything move a lot faster this would be one way to find an object doing it manually of course thankfully we've got the go to function though so we really shouldn't have to worry about that too much i'm sure there's going to be a few people who are having connection issues so let's talk about that now if you click the telescope icon up top in the center that'll bring up your mount settings i'm going to turn off the little green switch there that will bring us back to our starting point and if you look closely there's a little question mark icon if you click on that that's going to give you some valuable information feel free to pause the video and read through all this basically what it's telling us is that if we have the sky safari app installed on our phone we just need to input these settings and we should now be able to communicate between sky safari the asr pro and ultimately our go to mount and we'll talk about this more here in a minute when we actually get inside sky safari i just want you to be aware that you click the question mark and get everything you need to know alternatively if you don't have sky safari installed on your phone you could choose the eq mod mount same thing here if you hit the question mark it's going to tell you what settings to input in my case i've already done it but let me show you what'll happen maybe the first time you're doing your setup in my case when i first went through this process my bod value i think it's how you say was set to 9600 by default so when i tried to connect and turn on the mount here in the software it would go through and ultimately give me an error because for whatever reason that bot value wasn't allowing the mount to communicate so if you run into this problem and you know your cable is connected that's most likely the cause and we'll put this to 115 200 and try again there we go it works perfectly because we've cut the hand controller completely out of the equation we want to verify that the latitude and longitude and other information is being synced with them out and you can do that just by clicking that button there that's another reason i love this workflow because it's a real pain in the ass to have to go through the hand control every night and input all this manually on some 1990s hand controller oddly enough the tracking does not start automatically you actually have to come in here into the settings and turn on the little switch for the tracking i'm coming from a sky guarder pro where as soon as you turn on the tracker it begins tracking so this was a little bit new to me and that's why i wanted to make sure i included it right here i've turned on the tracking and put the rate to side aerial which is the speed of the stars that's where we're going to use tonight our next goal is to choose the object that we want to photograph for the night and if we scroll up there's a little line there that says view objects if you click on that you're now going to enter the asar pros database feel free to scroll down through here there's a lot of valuable information both the object name the coordinates for it and even where it's going to be in the sky using that graph over on the right if you click on hold on an object you can add it to maybe your favorites list that's what i've done for all my favorite objects that way i don't have to go through here and hunt for it each time i can just go directly to what i want to photograph you can also search directly for the objects that you want but this is another problem i have there's no way to search by the common name if i want to photograph orion it can't find it which is a real disappointment that's where sky safari is going to come in which we'll talk about here in a minute alternatively you can click the three lines in the upper right corner and choose whatever category you want maybe the messier objects ngc sh2 whatever for me the messier objects those are usually the bigger brighter ones that are going to be more fun to photograph so i just scroll down through here and there we have the orion nebula for example i can click and hold on it add it to my favorites or even just click on the thumbnail and get a nice little overview of that object and that's the basics of the asr pros internal object database if you're really smart and you know all the m numbers and sh numbers and ic numbers and ngc numbers you'll have no problem but if you're a normal guy like me and you don't know all that stuff you just know what it's called like andromeda or veil nebula then this is one area we're gonna have some trouble hopefully they'll update this in the future alternatively though you can use sky safari that's what we're gonna look at next but i just wanted to show you one way to do it here in the asar pro app sky safari is available on both android and iphone but you want to make sure you buy at least the plus version if you get the basic cheat version it won't be able to do everything that i'm going to show you today so again at least get the plus version that'll work fine on both android and iphone i'm going to demo with android today i'm going to show you how to set it up to work with the asar pro and your go to mount the first thing you want to do is click on these settings there at the bottom of the screen you can see the interface is very similar to stellar but it is quite a bit nicer here after you get into the settings you can scroll down look for the telescope submenu and then click on setup when you get into the telescope setup menu we're just going to repeat what the asar pro told us a couple minutes ago we'll start off with the scope type at the very top the asar pro told us to use mead lx200 classic so that's what we're gonna do after we set the scope type the amount type should be set to equatorial go to german that should work fine that's what i've been doing i haven't had any issues and then from there the connect via wi-fi should be checked auto detect skyfi is turned off the ip address is 10.0.0.1 the port number is 9624. if you've done all that you should be good to go you can now exit the settings menu and then click connect at the bottom of the screen that will connect your mount to sky safari and the asr pro as well if you get an error when you try and connect it could be because your phone has the lte data connection which is some weird android bug with all these astrophotography apps so turn off your lte data connection and try to connect again everything should just work though if you've been following along step by step and this is where sky safari really shines because you're free to now move around and click on anything you want to go to in this case the north american nebula i just tap on it then i hit go to at the bottom of the screen it will now automatically move my mount directly to the north american nebula and it should center it up right there in the frame so you can quickly begin taking photos if you're not quite sure where the object is that you want to photograph you could always search for it in the very bottom left of the screen you'll see a little search icon if you tap on that that'll bring up a search window and this is where i do like sky safari because unlike the asr pro you can search for the common name like horse ed and it should have no problem pulling that up once we search for horsehead you can see all the information there and at the bottom of the screen you'll see a little button that says go to once you click on go to it will now move your mount to the horsehead nebula very easy way to do everything so that's how you're going to use sky safari to find the objects that you want with the help of the asr pro in the back end and of course your go to mount now that we've done a brief overview of the asar pro and sky safari i want to walk you through the entire workflow from start to finish that way you understand what steps you need to do and in what order let's pretend we've just restarted the asa or app on our smartphone and we're starting over the first thing i want to do is take some three second long test photos with my telescope i have the bat knob mask on the front of my red cat and this is gonna allow me to get sharp stars i'm gonna slowly turn that focusing ring back and forth until i can see a three line pattern called diffraction spikes i'm just taking quick three second long photos because i don't want to waste a lot of time here and on my electronic filter wheel i'm using the l filter which lets in a lot of light if you're planning on shooting narrowband though you might want to use one of your narrowband filters to focus on because it might shift between your different filters in this case though i'm just keeping it simple so again i take a three second long photo adjust my focusing ring very slightly on my telescope and then i see how the diffraction spikes change that right there is looking pretty close i can always try to find a brighter star where the spikes will be more visible but in this case that was good enough now that i've focused my telescope i can pull the bat knob mask off and take one more three second long photo to verify everything looks good that looks good enough for me i can always refocus later it's just important that the stars are fairly sharp that way you can do the next step which is our polar alignment if i go to the polar alignment interface here i'll click the play button over on the right and this is another reason why i love the asr pro it pretty much automates this entire process when you compare this to something like the pull master software this is much much better in almost every single aspect because we have a go to mount the asa air is even going to rotate it for us we don't have to worry about loosening the right ascension lever and rotating it ourselves it just does it all automatically once it reaches about 60 degrees it stops the rotation and then takes another photo it's doing what we call plate solving in other words it takes the photo it looks up the stars with its internal database and it knows where it's pointing and this whole process just sees how the stars have rotated from the first vote of the second and very simply it's going to tell us to move in this case up 1 degree 11 minutes and then to the left 2 degrees 48 minutes 52 seconds this is where you'd want to go down to your wedge or your latitude base whatever you want to call it and try and make these adjustments after you think you've done it you can hit the refresh button down there at the bottom of the screen it will take another photo and update your current settings this is actually one area where i have a problem with the go to mount though because on my particular base the altitude adjustment is a real pain you have like this weird little lever you have to push in and then turn it it's not very intuitive and i actually really like the star tracker bases a lot better for this the altitude knob or the altitude screws in some cases are much better way to do things than a big old handle that you have to crank and turn which isn't very precise and it leads me to some problems anyway with a little bit of practice you'll eventually get the hang of it and you want to just keep adjusting your altitude and azimuth screws until the total error is as low as possible for me if i can get it down around five arc minutes or three arc minutes ideally less than that that'd be fine the asa or pro really won't let you finish though until you're two arc minutes or less that's what it wants you to be at but if you say you know what it's good enough for me you can always click that stop button over there on the right to get out of this interface and that's what i did the other night i got it down to about three arc minutes of error there i said i'm not wasting any more time that's good enough i stopped it that's pretty much step two we focused our telescope we did a precise polar alignment now we want to rotate everything back up to the starting position if you forget to do this step the go to function might not work properly later on so make sure you are aimed up towards polaris and one way to verify that is to take another three second long photo you should see polaris somewhere in the screen if you did your polar alignment correctly and your telescope and camera are aimed up at the right spot there we see players over on the left what i did there is click plate solve on the far left side of the screen and i tried to sync this information to my mount as you can see though we cannot actually do a plate saw within 5 degrees i think of the north or south celestial so in this case you don't really have to worry about it i'm just going through and just making sure that all of the information has been synced to the mount i'm also going to turn on the tracking because for whatever reason the tracking got turned off from here you can either use the asa or pro or sky safari to decide what object you want to try and go to if you look closely i'm going to show you every single step i did because like i said i'm still fairly new to this i've only done it about three nights and on this night the go-to actually worked so i want to show you everything i did even if i made a mistake which i'm not really sure if i did or not so we're back in sky safari i connected my mount it knows i'm aimed up right towards polaris that's a good sign what i was going to do next is click on polaris directly and align to it here in the application to be honest i don't really know if that does anything but i did it and it seemed to help so again i tapped on polaris i hit a line at the bottom of the screen and now it should be aligned up to polaris at this point my goal was to find an object that i want to photograph here in the app my thought process was let's start off very simple i can see some bright stars off to the left of players with my naked eye and therefore if i can see them i can verify if my telescope is actually aiming up to them or not so i tapped on navi here then i hit go to at the bottom of the screen i watched as my mount moved my camera telescope up towards this general region of the sky to be honest i don't quite remember what happened i don't think it lined it up properly though and that's why i got a little bit worried so i backed out of sky safari and said let me just try and stick with the asar pro app because i'm a little bit more familiar with that and that's ultimately what it ended up working really well when i got back to the asr pro i took another three second long photo for plate solving when this first photo completed though i noticed i had star trails when i zoomed in for whatever reason the mount had stopped tracking i don't know why that's why i mentioned earlier it's always a good idea to go back to your telescope settings and verify the tracking is turned on now that i've fixed that issue i took another three second long photo to verify that the tracking was working properly this time and that did the trick i now had sharp stars and i could do a plate solve if you want to do a plate solve you have to stop any type of image capture hit plate solve on the left and then hit sync mount when you do that the mount should now know where it's pointing at in the sky and you should be able to use the go to function of course you'll need to decide what object you want to go to in this case i already had the rosette nebia plugged in so i did one more plate solve and then hit sync and go to ngc2244 languages the rosette nebula at this point it's moving my camera and telescope around in the sky and i was honestly really surprised like i said i spent about two nights messing around with this i could not get the go-to function to work at all on this night as i walked you through step by step it actually worked i don't know what i did differently than the nights before but when i take one more three second long photo now watch what happens if any of you are really familiar with the rosette nebula then you should recognize this little cluster of stars right in the center of the screen i know as soon as i saw those i got really excited because that meant i was actually aimed up at the rosette nebula and just to be sure i hit play solve one more time and then hit sync mount just to verify that the coordinates there match what i see over on the right hand side of the screen to prove that this is the rosette nebula i now went to my filter wheel settings and rather than using the l filter i switch to the h alpha filter this filter is going to show the nebula detail a lot better and in fact on this particular night the full moon was out or nearly full and it was casting a lot of light into the scene but by using a narrow band filter i can cut out almost all of that light pollution from the moon or even a big city if i wanted to and get some amazing photos like the one you saw at the very start of this video and there we have it the rosette nebula and narrowband in just 30 seconds obviously it's very grainy but when you're taking a bunch of five or maybe six seven eight minute long photos it's going to turn out to be a great final image from here the only thing left is to start up our guiding turn on our camera's cooling system and then decide what camera settings we want to use most of the workflows done there's just a few more steps we got to do one thing i forgot to do was focus my guide scope and the stars were really out of focus here it was still sharp enough though for me to do my guiding and because i was running on a tight schedule i didn't bother trying to refocus it all i did was hit the begin guiding button on the right and because i have a go to mount now i had to change the deck mode to auto because we now can use both right ascension and declination for our guiding that's going to give us much better results another thing i did was go into my guide settings and turn on dithering dithering is going to clean up a lot of artifacts caused by your sensor and in most cases this means you no longer have to take bias or dark frames to some extent because the dithering will average out most of those sensor problems and you can always take a screenshot here and copy my settings that worked well for me but really the pixels value there is going to depend on your focal length of your telescope these at least get you started though and verify that ra only is turned off because if you have a go to mount you want to have both re and declination dithering to be clear the way dithering works is it moves your camera after every single photo in a random direction and this random motion of the object over the course of 10 20 30 40 plus photos will smooth out banding and hot pixels and things like that color model especially so dithering is a great tool i had a video a couple of months ago where i really didn't see the point of dithering because i was using a skyguard or pro and it really didn't do anything for me just waste a lot of time but with a go to mount this works much better and dithering is definitely a smart choice while the auto guider was doing its calibration that gave me some down time to continue on with the workflow because there's a lot of stuff you have to get ready to go from here i went to the auto run menu and you'll notice that i already has some settings from the night before i was taking five minute long photos with my sulfur and hydrogen alpha filter tonight though i wanted to throw an oxygen filter in the mix that way get a full set of narrowband images and it's very easy to do here in the asar pro app another reason why i really like this because i can quickly come in here set my shutter speed the amount of photos i want to take what filter i want to use and the software is going to label all my images as well so when i get to the computer it's going to be very easy to sort through all these after i created my shooting schedule i backed out of there and i went to check on my guiding calibration i figured it should almost be done and i just double click on the graph to get back to the guiding interface if i want to do that in this case though i almost forgot to turn on my camera's cooling system this is something that i'll actually warn you about if you're ready to take your photos it says hey turn on your cooling so in the main camera setting just flick the switch i put it to minus 20 degrees celsius and there we go while i was busy getting everything else completed the guiding finished the calibration and it's now running here we can see we got a real nice little line there with both our right ascension and blue and our declination in red if you're still new to all these terms it'll take a little bit a while to research it i've got some articles on my website that might help on my blog i explain what arc seconds are and what all these lines mean but really as long as the lines are fairly close to the center line you'll be okay another thing i forgot to do was check the focus on my telescope if you remember at the very start of the video i focused with my l filter but it's been probably 15 20 minutes now it got a little bit colder at night and i'm using an h alpha filter so it would have been a smart idea to refocus the telescope however what you just saw there was me zooming in to see if the stars look sharp i thought they looked okay there's also even a little focus sub menu here where it will zoom in kind of like a dslr on live view and give you almost a real time preview so you can tweak that focus ring back and forth to make the stars as sharp as possible to be honest i was running late for dinner so i didn't bother refocusing it i said it's close enough if i try and touch it i'll probably make it worse good enough for me with my guiding running my focus looking good and i know the mount's running well so i know i can get five minute sharp exposures i went back to the auto run sub menu and let it go and i'm now beginning my series of five minute long photos for sulfur h alpha and oxygen and just to be sure i went to the telescope settings and verified the tracking was turned on and that's all there is to it we've now completed the entire workflow in a pretty short amount of time without the need for that crappy old hand controller which drove me crazy so i love the fact that the asir pro allows you to pretty much do everything and for the few areas where it doesn't work so well you could always jump over to sky safari and use that for your go to provide it's working properly and that's all i've got for you in today's video hopefully you got something out of this really my main goal was to show you step by step what i did and how i was able to get the go-to function working all through the asr pro for the most part to be honest when i was thinking about getting a go to mount i was always very overwhelmed because i knew it would bring a whole new set of challenges with it but after just two or three nights i was able to get everything up and running and at least for one night i didn't encounter any problems so hopefully this gives you the confidence if you're still having trouble with your go to mount you can try it again with some of the things you might have learned or if you're thinking about getting a go-to mount i hope this made things a little bit easier and you see it's really not as daunting as it might have seemed [Music] you

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 56,105

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Id: KovCJRcZkDA

Length: 33min 11sec (1991 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021