Ad Astra Observatory

…with zero dropped subframes.

I spent a little time refining the polar alignment last night. I am still getting some drift while running unguided; I calculated it to be about 6′ from the pole now.

The guiding is even smoother now, if one could believe it possible.

I shot 20m subframes all night. I ended up with 5 frames of M51 (OK, but not worth posting). By the time M51 was finished (around 2am), Cygnus was up, and so I went and grabbed 10(!) more frames of Sh2-101.

The 3h 20m image came out pretty nice, but as always it could use some more integration time:

This is one of my standard 1500×1000 -> 900×600 crop-and-size jobs. There was a lot more context in the image, but Veronica is badly out of collimation at the moment, so there were some badly mangled stars; this is as good as I could get.

Things I noted last night:
– the pier topper needs to be rotated about 1/2″ clockwise, because the azimuth adjustment has run out of room to the west.
– Veronica needs to be recollimated. I am going to pull the long bolts and put the stock ones back in. I think I’m done with the RCC/OAG.
– I am not certain if it did anything bad, but I pulled the webcam out of the OAG and put it into the main focuser partway through the night. I would think that it doesn’t matter where in the FOV the star lies, but better safe than sorry.
– I will not be putting the mount on the tripod for tonight’s star party. I think it’s more impressive on the pier.
– One of the GOTOs last night was so accurate that I looked in the finder, couldn’t find the star, started pushing it around with the hand controller, and realized it was sitting behind the crosshairs. (:
– The mount put up more gaudy numbers; 0.4″ RMS for the night. wow.

A good night. And I got an hour more sleep and still hit a Cygnus target!