I went up to Hopewell on Wednesday night, and practiced once again taking images of RRLyrae with my Seestar S50, but this time with the built-in light-pollution rejection filter in place. I figured that would reduce the number of photons by a lot, and maybe by enough to stop overwhelming the pixels.

Unfortunately, it was not sufficient, so, since I cannot reduce the number of seconds of exposure for each sub-image (or ‘slice’ as AstroImageJ calls them) below 10, and I cannot change the ISO or gain for the chip, the only choices left are, in order of ease of implementation:

1. De-focus the images to spread the photons into a wider range of pixels, hopefully not causing any of them to become saturated, but not so much as to confuse the plate-solving app;
2. Make a black, circular mask smaller than 50 mm in diameter and put it in front of the lens, reducing the total number of photons;
3. Persuade the engineers and programmers at ZWO to change the software to allow users to reduce the length of exposures, and to allow time lapse photography with what they call Star-Gazing but everybody else calls deep-space observing.

Number 1 I will do next time.

By the way, the exact mechanism by which this variable star dims and brightens is still not fully understood, though its timing cycle is extremely regular and quite well known.

No Auroras for me:

It was very cold and windy so I couldn’t stand being outside up on the Bull Run Mountain ridge for very long at a time. The sky was almost perfectly clear the entire night, and the beautiful winter constellations were extremely bright, and it was fun watching them make that apparent great pivot around us.

I saw no auroras; since I was was groggy (from forgetting my meds) and quite cold, so I spent most of the night inside napping and trying to get warm, but went out from time to time to look around and to check on the progress of my little Seestar. So when the peak happened I was probably dozing. Not too many other folks saw it, apparently, and the images I’ve seen were not nearly as impressive as for other aurorae on other dates. Oh, well.