Ad Astra Observatory

I pulled the RA worm, cleaned and regreased it, and reinstalled it with an ammeter hooked up so I could see what the load looks like. In theory, if all is perfect, the ammeter would be perfectly steady.

I got it to a point where the mount was drawing within +/-20mA (and 90% of the time within 10mA), and decided to try it out under the stars again.

I put the rig back on the mount, carefully balanced in Dec, then in RA, then I cranked the heck out of the clutches.
ammeter still reads really low at idle.. unloaded the mount was ~0.18A (180mA). Loaded, it was more like ~0.24A (240mA). During a meridian flip (both motors cranking full speed), the amps went up to ~0.88A (still a little less than 1A). shrug.

I had to rebuild my pointing model since I’d removed the battery over the weekend. So I did. I’m at A: -8 E: 4. Not great, but will work for now.

Had to do a tiny amount of maintenance, too; to get the scopes off, I had to remove the finder on the guidescope, so I had to resynch them, took 5min or so. I also checked the focus on the guider — it was fine. Can’t wait to get my new focuser installed, though.

Just as I was about to start guiding….

clouds rolled in.

Oh well. I got a lot done today. I left it set up for looking at amps while guiding.

An hour later, I checked the sky, and it was clear again, so I decided to try out the guiding with the adjusted worm.

Well, the results were mixed. There was a decent amount of wind, and clouds rolled in after 90min or so, so the atmosphere was not as steady as one might like. But I got some data, and it looks like I might have cleaned up the tracking… a very little. I don’t know. I guess going from +/-9” to +/-6” peak-to-peak is actually a pretty big improvement. I just don’t know if I can really trust the data from last night.

More tweaking. More amp-checking. I may have to figure out how to check the amps from the computer…