Ad Astra Observatory

In a stroke of strange luck, it was clear out tonight, the very next day after I got the new VM. I took the mount out in stages, first just the mount and the new wedge for the north foot, to see if I could get it at least somewhat polar-aligned.

That took awhile; it’s been forever since I’ve aligned the mount, and I don’t have a good feel for how to set the mount in the driveway to get north. I miss my observatory.

I finally convinced myself that I’d aligned the mount, and started trying to power it up. There was a lot of fumbling in the dark involved.

There were some problems with getting the software running, but a few extra downloads got me going.

However, once I got the mount connected to TheSky 6, I started having a very weird slewing problem. If I run the mount with the hand controller, or with the controller buttons on the computer, it runs fine. But if I tell the mount to GOTO somewhere, RA spins up to full speed, but Dec … doesn’t. Dec spins up to about 10x sidereal or something, and just… keeps… running. It’s very weird.

I tried disconnecting and reconnecting a lot, but nothing worked. It eventually fogged over and I took everything inside — I’ll fix this problem when it’s light out. It’s totally reproducible.