Ad Astra Observatory

It was sort of clear last night, so I decided to go out and continue getting the mount back together.

It took me awhile to get the cable harness re-installed. It’s always like this when I haven’t been working with it for awhile; I always feel a little rusty until I get a few nights under my belt.

I eventually got the autoguider, camera, cables, power supplies, and computer hooked up.

I also tried out a new balancing scheme, to see if that helps my tracking performance (which was pretty good to begin with anyway). I also decided to try running more counterweight at the top of the CW shaft, rather than “as little as possible” further down the shaft. So Veronica and the full camera rig are now balanced with three 14# weights. It’s a lot of iron, but the mount did feel like it “settled” a little. We’ll see how that turns into photos as we go forward.

It took a couple of tries to get the computer up and running, too. The first computer I tried turned out to be the backup machine. oops. 🙂 Like I said, I’m a little rusty.

Once i got things up and running, I opened the roof to find that it was mostly clouded over. I was able to get the finder aligned and camera roughly focused before things filled in. I also shot some 30sec and then 2min shots of starfields, to see how the unguided tracking was working. I can’t say that I have a really solid answer yet, but certainly, the shots had some stars in them, and they were more or less round. So, the rig is up and running, I just have to get everything tweaked into place so that I can really start shooting again.

Todo: tweak focus, tweak polar alignment, work on Velcro for the cable harness.