Ad Astra Observatory

Tonight was cloudy, but the clouds were high and thin, transparent enough to see Orion, The Dogs, Moon, Mars, and that’s about it.

So, I spent some time doing maintenance.

I swapped the motors and gearboxes; the motors had been swapped last time out, so they are actually back on their original axes now; the new gearbox is on Dec, the old Dec gearbox is on RA, the old RA gearbox is spare.

I removed Pumpkin from the guidescope position and rebalanced Veronica. Now I have a single 21# weight about halfway up the CW shaft.

Then I decided to undertake the opus for the night, getting the off-axis guider working.

I first needed to get the OAG pointed at something useful. The bright moon helped a lot with this.

Once I sort of figured out the focus using an eyepiece (by the way, the 32mm eyepiece needs to be parfocalized again), I got the finder lined up with the OAG temporarily (the OAG’s FOV is off to the side of the camera’s). It took some work, but I got the OAG focused on Sirius. I was about to test the ST-4, when the OAG sort of fell apart. Some setscrews needed tightening, and that required pulling apart most of the off-axis part. I pulled everything apart, got the thing put back together properly, and was able to refocus more quickly this time. It’s a fiddly process, but I could get better at it with practice I suppose.

I got the OAG focused on Sirius (using the ST-4 Ronchi focuser), then put the ST-4 in place to make sure all was well.

Things went so well, in fact, that I was able to get the ST-4 aligned with the RA/Dec axes (took a 90deg rotation and then the regular fine rotation to get the numbers perfect).

I tightened all the thumbscrews, got the camera reinstalled, and just about then, the clouds got nice and thick, so I cleaned up, shut down, and came back in for the night.

Just the thing for a mostly cloudy, nearly full moon night.