Wow – two clear nights in a row. About the best stretch of the entire summer so far, testament to how bad this summer has been. In fact the past 18 months or so has been much more cloudy than I can recall (other than when I used to live in Michigan).
Weather
About 70F, no wind, steady (about 1.6 arcsec seeing) and still slowly clearing from the forest fire smoke. Full moon tonight – looks more clear than last night.
Targets
- Rig 1: Deneb and P Cyg. Took four sets of P Cyg data at H-alpha – roughly separated an hour apart. Took two sets of Deneb at Si lines – about four hours apart.
- Rig 2: RX 2133+51 – 220 90-second images!
Software
After weeks of fighting with issues with the newest version of Mira (Mira Pro 8eUE – beta 5, released on August 6th) I’ve finally gotten it to work. Mike Newberry obviously has tweaked a few things and fixed a few of the bugs found, but it appears some of the problems may be due to access restrictions in Windows 7. I originally contacted Mike when I could not get Mira 7 UE (7.974) to save calibration parameter sets/profiles. In fact, following a Windows 7 automatic update sometime in mid-July, the program would not save any parameters from forms/dialogs, etc. So at the time Mike suggested I upgrade to the new version, so I bought a license renewal which will also give me Mira 9 UE when it appears (later this year?). Anyway, lots of Mira 8 just did not work. Way too much to list here, but it was basically unusable. But following a new Beta release (beta5) most of the problems seemed solved, but I could not get it to see scripts from the script manager dialog. For whatever reason, after using some scripts in Mira 7, I went back to Mira 8 and there were all the scripts! Very strange. The only thing I can point to that I changed was that I changed the permission in C:\Users\Mike so that it was not “Read-Only”. Pretty simple fix if that’s all it was. It’s great having Mira back as I really do depend on it and dreaded the thought of trying to create something on my own that would fulfill the tasks I use it for! There are still some things that are very flaky – particularly how it saves (or does not save) default behavior of things like default image display parameters. But Mira UE8 is looking really good right now – I really like the improvements in the UI.
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