Tuesday, May 3, 2016

M81 and 82 Revisited

A nice clear night and an opportunity to image from a friend's home north of the city lights produces a pretty picture:


This is based on 44 x 3m light frames with 15 dark frames, Canon T2i at ISO 800 on a TV-102 at f/7.

Power saving update: the software I talked about that turned off the laptop LCD display wouldn't keep it off. Apparently something about using ImagePlus kept turning the display back on. This wouldn't be a problem if a hand control was used to run the DSLR and images were stored on-camera.

Battery Update: I ran the laptop (fully charged), dew prevention, mount and camera from the 35Ah battery for four hours; loaded voltage fell from 12.7 (unloaded, 13V)  to 11.8V. Unfortunately I popped the battery onto the charger as soon as I got home and didn't check its final unloaded voltage.

Assuming it was 12.1V it would have been at 50% capacity, meaning it would have supplied about 17Ah or about 4Ah per hour. This is about right if I take into account that the old laptop battery was in place and it could run the laptop for maybe two hours, after which the 35Ah battery was supplying 6A to both run the laptop and recharge its battery.

That's a whole lot of assumptions and guesses, though, so it doesn't mean much. I may end up rewiring the battery box to include an ammeter so that I can monitor power use more rigorously.

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