Ad Astra Observatory

ad Astra Observatory is back online.

With the newly-leveled mount, I worked the polar alignment some more. It still needs tweaking, but once I gave up on PemPro (which has never really worked all that well as a polar alignment tool for me) and switched to WCS (which has worked splendidly), things went more smoothly. There’s still something strange about the slewing direction, but I’ll figure that out later.

I decided to grab some autoguider data in MaxIM. After some initial thrashing about aggressiveness and delay between corrections, the mount settled in nicely to an RMS around 0.19, or 1.1″ (peak to peak!). I gathered data for a good long time, and analyzed for PE:

There are no words. “Um, wow” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
I love this mount. I don’t care if I can’t run any other telescope. If I can only do this with Pumpkin, I will gladly shoot the whole sky at 400mm in every wavelength of light I can think of. Are you kidding me?!

Here’s the photo I pulled out. It’s just 3m subframes, because the skyglow eats images longer than that. 3m guided subframes from Pumpkin is not shocking. But, here it is anyway.

The mount needs tweaking; a saddle. Someplace to hang the hand controller. Some strangeness about which way is up.

And of course it remains to be seen whether this tracking will hold up at 2350mm (or even 1000). And for 20 minute subframes. And… well, the sky’s the limit.

But, in short, so far, so good.

sic itur ad astra “thus shall you go to the stars”, indeed.