Ad Astra Observatory

I got some photons on the mirror over the weekend.

Still test shots. I think the new shrouds are working OK. It now complains that the pointing is off again (I shouldn’t have to re-polar-align after changing OTAs — polar alignment is a function of the mount only, right?).

And I think that I’ve doinked the collimation a bit too. Which reminds me, I need new batteries for my laser collimator.

And manually focusing is, like, totally bogus.

But, the pointing model is sufficient to get objects mostly on the chip, which is good.

And when there’s no trailing (like, in images <45s), a lot of photons come in in a short period of time. Nothing worth posting (or even processing). But M13 in 30sec looks pretty nice.