Ad Astra Observatory

Finally.

Ad Astra Observatory at Newark, CA is back in business.

The UPS guy dropped the very heavy box containing the mount around 3pm.
I’m not entirely happy with the state of the mount post-repair, but that’s another post.

I put 04026 back on the pier, and started preparing for sundown.

I tried to mount Trixie, but that’s going to take some tweaking. Again, another post.

The LED in the polar scope illuminator is very dim. I tried new batteries, cleaning the contacts, and various tweaks. I finally removed the Tak illuminator, and tried out the LED from the guiding eyepiece. That took a little rigging, but worked… eh, ok. I ended up using a red flashlight , holding it over the end of the polar axis, tweaking the mount, repeat. It took some time. After about 90 minutes, I had Polaris where I wanted it. With a decent illuminator, it would have taken minutes, if not seconds. I did a quick test of the reticle alignment, by rotating the RA axis through 270° or so. It was difficult to get a perfect reading, but it looks like this reticle is installed properly, leading me to believe that I’m not crazy and that the old reticle was out of alignment. Nifty!

To really test the polar alignment, I needed to mount up a telescope.

I chose Veronica (had to remove one of the Dob bearings 🙂 ), and got the mount balanced, eyepiece and finder installed, and finder aligned. All of this went pretty quickly.

I pointed the mount at M42, starting to cloud up, but I could still see the nebula. I let the object drift across the eyepiece a little (I hadn’t hooked up power yet); things looked ok.

So I dug out the hand controller and a power cable. The plug sockets are much tighter now; cool.

I recentered the nebula, and came inside to let it all run for awhile. I went back out 20 minutes later, to find the nebula still centered, and the same starfield in the eyepiece.

I decided to take a look at Saturn. Man, I am so glad to have the rings opening up again! Just gorgeous. I left it at high magnification (200x) to further check the polar alignment, but I’m pretty well sold that it’s close enough for visual use.

Welcome back, 04026. It’s nice to have an observatory again.

And thank you, astronomy gods, for a clear night to test my mount.