Ad Astra Observatory

suckerholes tonight, so I am going to see if I can get my A:5 E:4 down lower.

I’m running just the webcam with 2x Barlow today. The 6x thing from yesterday was a bit overkill and I think that it was introducing flexure.

I also spent the time to get the reticle, webcam, and finder all agreeing on what the “center” of the screen is. Makes it a lot easier to find stars when I can just plop them in the finder and there it is on the screen at 600x.

I am aligned on Betelgeuse and running WCS.
The first run, I think I got mid-300s on “ddA” which I am given to understand is the polar error. I let it go for 550sec or so.

The second run is about 1000sec in now. ddA = ~170.

Overshot for the third run, had to go backwards. -300 or so.

4th run, didn’t even do a correction. It was that close. Like, the two sets of lines were nearly on top of each other.

Moved to the East horizon to do elevation. -450 or so. Corrected 1 screen.

Second run, -200 or so. Corrected about 2/3 of what they showed, not more than 1/2 the whole screen.

Third run, very small correction. ddA in the -120 range.

Fourth run, I don’t think I’m going to do a correction; the error value is popping between small negative and small positive. I’ll see what they suggest for a correction and decide from there.

Whoops, I lost the star in a cloud and the correction factor went bonkers. I think I’ll call it a night.

I’d like to rebuild the pointing model and see what I get, but I think that may be a bit optimistic; the clouds have been pretty thick all night.

The clouds are now a featureless haze over the whole sky. I’m done for now. Rebuild the pointing model next clear night.

I am feeling pretty good about the polar alignment right now. We’ll see whether that bears out in the data next time out.