Ad Astra Observatory

Clear Sky Clock said it would be cloudy all night, so of course it stayed 90% clear until about midnight, when it socked in. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I decided to get the autoguider up and running tonight. I wanted everything focused and aligned so that I can get started shooting again for real.

On top of this desire, my new clip-in Ha filter showed up today, and I really wanted to try it out!

So I hooked up the autoguider, got it all focused and balanced the rig. I booted up the scope, which wanted to cold-start again. No problem. Quick slew to Betelgeuse… and that’s where the problems started.

For some reason, the main scope and its finder (which were aligned as recently as 2 days ago, and have not been touched) are no longer in alignment. No problem; I see the star in the finder, I’ll just sweep the scope around until I find it.

No dice.

I don’t know what my problem was, but I tried everything I could think of, including sweeping the scope by hand, and I could not find *anything*. It took me 40 minutes to finally stumble over Rigel and then get the finder and scope aligned. While that was in the vicinity, I set up the guide scope to be roughly aligned, too.

As part of this fun, I figured out that the reticle is not centered in the guiding eyepiece. Again. That is a silly feature. But I figured out how to get it centered, so now the guide finder, guide scope, and reticle eyepiece all agree about the center of the field. Which is nice.

So after losing about 45 minutes of clear sky, I got the scope turned on and started an alignment run… the deep cycle battery died. argh. OK, set up the 15v power supply — deal with the battery later. Now I’m working the alignment (oh, I had mis-calculated GMT earlier in the evening, too — I was having a bit of a day), and the polar alignment is way off compared to a few days ago. Pulled out the polar alignment scope illuminator, and it’s got a busted power cable. Again. That is the worst design ever. I decided to just go forward with it; I’ll deal with polar alignment later. I need to be using my Gizmo anyway. Where is that thing? hmm…

OK, so I’m aligned. I boot up the computer, and shoot a test image of Betelgeuse through the Ha filter. It is of course not in focus. No problem. Fire up FocusMax (nothing can go wrong with the focuser — it’s on COM1), and …

all of the FocusMax windows show up offscreen. I have no idea why. I even tried to Regedit them into place; no dice. Meanwhile, tick, tick, tick, clear sky still, but I can see clouds moving in. Also, Orion is now well past meridian. grr!

Fine. I fire up the focuser in MaxIM (I tried to get the ST-4 and mount working in MaxIM, too, but needed to reinstall the USB-to-Serial drivers for reasons passing understanding, and never got that working right — you guessed it, deal with it later), did an autofocus run in MaxIM for the first time ever.

Let me say at this point that I really like the new MaxIM focus routine. It brings up a V-curve just like FocusMax, and while it seems to converge on a solution a little more slowly, it does seem to get there pretty well, as evidenced by the fact that in just a few minutes, I had autofocused the Ha filter on Betelgeuse! (FWHM of ~5.5, high winds and encroaching clouds and sketchy collimation, so give me a break, this is about what I usually get)

So I fired a 40sec exposure of Betelgeuse, so I could see some diffraction spikes, and got a bright fuzzy ball with lots of stars in the background. I looked up, and couldn’t even see the star through the cloud cover. OK, I get it. So I slewed over to M42 anyway, because I was going to make sure I was in focus.

A couple of 40sec and then 2min frames of M42 looked pretty good given they were clearly destroyed by clouds.

I tried to set up the ST-4, but it spent a lot of time losing the star and giving me “E E” followed by “-E -E” type corrections, so I turned it off. I only like guiding in MaxIM if I can help it.

At this point, it was about midnight, and we get to where I started this post… socked in solid with clouds, and no images to show for it.

And a longer todo list.

But a few more things are set up again, including of all things, the autofocus routine in MaxIM! Cool.

Fingers crossed for a clear night this weekend. Next one won’t be wasted.