Ad Astra Observatory

I got about 20 minutes of clean suckerhole tonight. It’s been cloudy for days now, even a bit of rain (very unusual weather for late April/early May in CA). When I checked right after sunset, it was socked in, but when I glanced out around 10:30, it was clear as a bell.

Unforuntately, my mount was still ripped apart from all the maintenance. So I had to mount up the scope, get everything balanced, and get all the finders aligned, and *then* I had to cold start the mount and build a pointing model before I could try any guiding.

By the time I got everything mounted and balanced and the roof open, the clouds had rolled back in. So I spent some time getting finders aligned, etc. on the moon. Even through the clouds, the 8-day moon was bright enough to make this pretty easy. An excellent use of an otherwise useless sky. I also mounted the 300D to the end of the CW shaft and got that aligned to the main scope. I hope to be able to set up 2 imaging rigs at once. Cool.

Things were looking grim for getting a pointing model, though. I had just decided to shut everything down for the night when I started to be able to see 2 or 3 stars through a thin cloud layer. I quickly got fired up, built a nice 6 or 8 star pointing model (I aligned on everything I could see and a few things I just had to point and pray), and I was off and running.

While waiting for a particularly nice suckerhole to drift into place, I aligned the ST-4’s axes with the mount, and centered the ST-4’s finder and also figured out the dimensions of the guide chip within the finder. All nice maintenance.

I set the main scope on M13 and tried to find a guidestar; no dice. Nothing bright enough to show through the clouds in the finder.

So I slewed over to M57 and found a real bright (50 on the ST-4) star to guide on, and grabbed the laptop. A little MaxIM magic, and I was off to the races. I only got 3 shots before the clouds rolled in to stay.

But that was about 15 minutes of guiding data (which is what I was after in the first place), and upon processing the results…

+/- 5” periodic error, without PEC. 10” peak-to-peak. The new worm cut my PE in about half. Not too bad.
With PEC training, I might be able to get down in the +/- 1”-2” range, and then I might be about done messing with the mount for awhile.

Some gut feelings from watching the guiding with the new worm. The corrections feel smaller. The Y corrections are almost non-existent (even with a steel worm). The X corrections could probably use some tweaking of settings (was I in Visual Mode or Photo mode? Tweak the aggressiveness, currently at 3. etc). But overall, I’m pleased with the new worm. It will take a lot more tweaking before it’s perfect, but.

+/- five arcseconds. Nice. If I’m shooting with Pumpkin, I might not even turn on the guider.