Ad Astra Observatory

I spent the night polar aligning the NJP.
Man, I love the sound of the mount as it slews. It’s… hard to describe.

The polar scope (and its attendant app) got me close enough for visual work, but when I started running unguided images of varying lengths, I noted that I was getting a *lot* of drift in Dec.

So I pulled up PemPro (my trial still has 13 days left on it), and started a software polar alignment routine. PemPro’s routine is slick, but I don’t know that it’s worth $150, given that I can’t use many of the other features.

I will have to find a polar alignment program. I’ll get to that later.

The strange thing is that I hooked up several programs (PemPro, MaxIM, and Cartes du Ciel) to the Temma all at once via ASCOM, and things got really confused. In particular, someone in the setup has north and south switched. I will hold down the “north” button on the hand controller, and watch as the scope points poleward, and in the planetarium program, the pointer is moving south. Also, I keep needing to set Dec to “-30” in order to get the scope to point to +30 Dec.

Something that needs figuring out. I don’t know where the mistake is, but I’ll find it.

Good news is that the slews were working well. I dropped several clusters right in the FOV, with a single star alignment. Nice.