Ad Astra Observatory

My autoguiding system is so broken right now.

The OAG really complicates the task of finding a guidestar, because among other things, the OAG is very difficult to get to, so I continually find myself trying to jam the guide camera in between the OAG and the finder, for instance. I am finally finding guidestars with it, but the ST-4’s small FOV and mediocre sensitivity is also a real drag.

I didn’t want to have to redo my whole pointing model by remounting Pumpkin (and the attendant rebalancing, etc. that goes with that). So my “guidescope” sits around gathering dust while I struggle.

I finally decided that I needed to figure out how to get the webcam working as a guider. This has its ups and downs — with a maximum exposure length of 0.2s, the webcam is only picking up the very brightest stars. On the other hand, I can sort of sweep around and find guidestars with the webcam in “live” mode. So that’s kind of nice.

So the OAG + webcam is the worst possible case: a limited selection of stars to choose from, and a very insensitive camera with which to find them.

I suppose what I really need is live mode for the ST-4. I doubt that will happen. So I need to figure this out some more.

In short, I had 4 hours of clear sky tonight, and I have a pointing model (and a focused camera) to show for it.

grr.