no improvement (Halifax)

I was a little disappointed with how things played out last evening. Initially, it was looking good weather-wise and the observatory started imaging. But early on there were unusual errors.

Four of my targets were purportedly "not found in database" or had a "malformed position in fielddb.txt!" I had never seen that message before. It seemed an odd message too as my requests had been added to the queue. How could they not be in the database. Perhaps data got corrupted when passed from the computer to the mount? Something was kludged...

There was light at the end of the tunnel when two requests were later successfully completed. I would have been really bummed if nothing had worked!

But when I saw the results in the morning, I was not thrilled. The NGC 1232 image was no better than on 2 Jan. The 16 Eridani image, while faster than on 7 Jan, down to a half-second, did not reveal the B companion.

I learned later that both targets were pretty low. From the log (all times AST):

2018-01-19 20:47:38:
NGC1232 has been observed
10 x 60 seconds in LUM
Airmass=2.610

2018-01-19 21:06:57:
GSC0587800248 has been observed
20 x 0.5 seconds in LUM
Airmass=2.827

It will be a challenge improving on existing results if I have to punch through two and a half atmospheres or more. I'll need perfect seeing and transparency. 1232 seems to be a very low contrast galaxy. 16 Eri I could try to shoot even faster...

I don't want to complain.