Jerry -
The noise is about what I would expect with this camera running at -10 deg and a 240 second exposure. . . . . Would it be possible for you to post on your site the raw image as well as the darks and flats you used?
Jerry, it was a 300 sec exposure. I 'll get the raw, dark and flats up on a public server in the next couple of days so anyone can grab them. The files are 13megs each so initially I did not want to post the source files figuring no one would download that much data.
I have been following your adventures with the Rent-a-scope program. In your experience is it difficult to get time on a particular scope or do you post a request which gets put into the ACP planner queue?
To keep the cost within - for me - reason, I subscribed to the $40 per month GRAS plan which does not include scripting. The next subscription level is at $90 p/m and includes scripting. I have never felt scope resource constrained with GRAS Australia. During the best time to use it from Utah - 4am to 8am MST - there is always one high-end refractor free (106 Tak) and one large 10 inch or greater astrograph with a high-end ST camera available. One usually is available on login or becomes available at most with a 5 to 10 minute wait. Since my experience level isn't such that I am hot for just one specific larger aperature scope. Therefore, I have not felt constrained. For GRAS New Mexico, the situation is the same but the probability of having to wait a few minutes before a scope opens up is higher. For both the New Mexico and Australia scopes - at least for this time of year - weather outages is the constraining factor. Even in southern hemisphere Australia, I am average maybe a 25% chance of having the domes open. The other 60% of the time they are weather closed. Another 15% is service outages. Because of that, I'm not too optimistic that you would get that much out of imaging by a scripted run. It felt is was better to have a list of targets of opportunity and to get what you can manually when the weather is clear. The GRAS high-end mounts and auto-exposure all run spot on target as instructed. IMHO, auto-focus is less than what one could get with monitored manual or monitored auto-focus. I haven't used it, but I'd feel confident about submiting scripts and just picking up the image results by FTP later. My next planned test targets are Mars in northern hemisphere and a comet in the southern hemisphere. Overall, the experience is much less satisfying than setting up my own scope and taking images with my inexpensive equipment. I view it mostly as a way to capture a few images to play around with during the overcast northern Utah winter season. It's also educational to work with these high-end megapixel cameras and mounts that I ordinarily am unable to afford. One quickly gets the message that the name of the imaging game is "tracking accuracy, tracking accuracy and tracking accuracy" followed by "long-term exposure, long-term exposure and long-term exposure." Those are just my general impressions. Hope that helps. Clear Skies - Kurt