Ad Astra Observatory

I finally got myself together enough (with a little help from my friends) to set up some astronomy equipment.

It took a bit of hunting around, but I scrounged enough parts to put together 04026, Veronica, and the rest of the imaging rig, and set up for a night of starlight.

I was on a tripod in the driveway, not the cushy accomodations I’m used to, but still not too bad. Power and ethernet are available, and there’s plenty of sky.

A few of the neighbors have outside lights they leave burning all night; once I get up and running for good, I’ll speak with them about it.

Polar alignment was first up; I had to bring the mount up 10° for the new latitude. I ran into a bit of a problem here — the mount is built in such a way that it’s difficult to raise the elevation past 45° or so. I ended up having to put a 3 inch “lift” under the north tripod leg to get it to align. Once I got Polaris in the polar scope, though, alignment took just minutes.

Up went Veronica and the cable rig, cameras, etc. Things weren’t in perfect balance, but I went with it.

Ethernet went in without a hitch. Power, ditto. I only had 120v (I hadn’t bothered to drag out the 12v supplies), so I had no focuser, no mirror fan, … well, no, that’s it. Now that the mount has a dedicated 24v power supply, everything else pretty much runs off of 120v.

The guider kept wanting to pick guidestars that were near the edges of the field. shrug. They worked OK. Guiding was hovering around 2″ in Dec all night, about normal for an imperfect polar alignment, imprefect balance, and a bit of a sketchy night, seeing wise.

I pointed at M31, way too large for Veronica’s FOV, but with the benefit of being visible in the finder (and nearly visible naked-eye).

I shot a normal sequence of 10min and 5min subframes (we’ll see how that turns out later), and had a grand time watching TV while remotely connected to the mount with VNC.

I started getting tired around 2:30, went outside to shut down, and noticed that it was starting to cloud up anyway. I dragged everything inside for the night, and went to sleep. I woke up to a rainshower. Lovely.

Setting up in the driveway is not as cool as having a dedicated shed. But it felt really good to get out and grab some photons.

The skies are darker here than they were in Newark, by at least a full magnitude.

Ad Astra Observatory has got a new callsign. We are now Ad Astra Observatory at Hilltop (WA).

sic itur ad astra