Ad Astra Observatory

I had a bunch of maintenance piling up in the obvservatory, so I decided to do some of it since it’s raining all weekend.

I spent a little time getting the mount more level, and adjusting the elevation on the polar alignment. I still don’t think it’s perfect, but I think I’m closer.

The polar alignment still needs adjustment in azimuth, and a final check in elevation.

I installed the new EEPROM (v1.04; apparently 1.05 is only from Goerlich) and a new battery in the mount. I also hooked up the GPS and got the time and location correct.

I mounted up the new autoguider and tried to take a couple of daytime shots to test it out, but the observatory computer fried, so I spent the time to rebuild the observatory machine from the ground up. That took longer than I expected, but I think it’s up and running now. I was having an awful time trying to get VNC to work properly. It was running really slowly on a fresh install of Win XP SP3. After much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, I rebooted all the elements of the LAN (modem, router, etc), tweaked the firewall on the new machine, and installed several Windows and Dell updates. Something in there “clicked”, and now it’s up again and fast as ever.

I took the C9.25 to a local park and set up the artificial star about 75yd away. That was more than enough to get me in focus, and with a few tweaks of the collimation knobs, I saw, for the first time, *perfect* Airy disks! I was collimating at 700x, so gorgeous. The C9.25 is ready for… something. It’s back in its (new) case for now, but ready to rock.

Buoyed by that success, I decided to try to collimate Veronica, too. This was not as successful. I will have to read up on collimation, because the closest I could get to Airy disks was seeing little tiny “crosses” (even on the dimmest light), which merged “vertical” if I went one way out of focus, and “horizontal” if I went the other way. There is a ton of light being thrown off outside of the 4 main diffraction spikes, too. I think I’m closer, but I will be using the C9.25 or Pumpkin to do polar alignment and pointing models for awhile…

A very productive weekend, despite only having 90 minutes of clear sky.