[APML] ST-4 and the Northern lights

["John Lanoue" <johnlanoue@hotmail.com>]

Greetings,

I know I'm not imagining this...

So last night I was preparing for an all night imaging
session when the northern lights flared up (in Bedford, NH),
so I rushed up to an open field, snapped about 30 or so photos
over the course of an hour, then went back to my observatory
to continue with my setup procedure.

When I finally got on my target (NGC7K) and acquired a guidestar
with my trusty ST-4, I went to do a calibration and nada, nothing,
the guidestar wouldn't move (thus the x,y readout didn't change).
I fiddled with cables, reboots, etc... for about another
hour before giving up, I just simply couldn't get that x,y
readout to change (I could get it to change manually by using
the keypad on the lx200).  Flustered, around midnight, I went
back to the observatory to retry, and whaddyaknow, the calibration
worked fine.

Now a similiar failure happened sept 7th, 2002, the night of the
last big aurora here in the northeast.  I know that the ST-4 is
finicky about power draw and I know auroral activity can wreak
havoc on power grids... is this just coincidence that the two
times my ST-4 has let me down were nights with auroral activity
or is the inability to calibrate a manifestation of 'dirty' AC
power?

Puzzled in Bedford...

john


John Lanoue
Principal Software Engineer
Bedford, NH
http://www.geocities.com/johnlanoue/

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