Ad Astra Observatory

The sky has cleared up at least a little on 3 successive weekends — it’s like the stars miss me and want me to come visit again. So I’ve been giving my gear a shakedown.

When I last left the mount, I’d had to do some serious surgery on it in order to diagnose and then fix an unplugged Dec encoder cable. But, with GOTO working again, I figured I was ready to add on the next layer of gear; the autoguider.

Art has been dissing me about how slowly I’ve been taking this whole thing, but I have this sneaking suspicion that if I try to put the whole rig together at once, there will be so many problems at the same time that I’ll give up in disgust. So, one step at a time.

It wouldn’t be so bad to be right all the time, if it wasn’t so damned predictable.

I got the mount out, polar aligned (kinda), and booted up in TheSky, and I tried a couple of slews, which pretty much convinced me that either the finder isn’t aligned (totally possible) or I was not correctly polar aligned (almost certain).

I decided to give up on polar alignment/slewing for a bit, and pop on the autoguider. I figured I could give the polar alignment/plate solving tools a crack at helping me get aligned.

I could not. get. the autoguider. to work. in the VM. There’s some kind of driver problem. I got it to connect in my old VM, but of course, my old VM was not my primary astro machine, so there are no tools (like PHD Guide etc) that will use the autoguider for anything useful like alignment.

I was frustrated and very cold (when it’s clear in the winter here in WA, it gets coooold — my fingers were really frozen), so I headed into the shop, turned on the heater, and found something else to get rigged up. I decided on getting Pumpkin going. I had to sort of remind myself how to use all my bits and parts, and why Pumpkin was not already set up with rings and things. I cobbled together a DUP and the rings (it was the bolts that were the problem), and headed back out to actually mount a “real” scope on the NJP. I put the scope on board, did the balancing thing, and popped in an eyepiece. Nice. I think I was looking at Polaris, but who knows? Nice starfield. I really do like Pumpkin.

I tried to get the Celestron NexImage working, because if I could get that working, I could use WCS to work on the alignment.

That didn’t work either. Driver problems. I spent a lot of time in the cold on Google trying to figure out drivers. Get the idea that I should have done more testing during daylight? Yeah, shaddup. I was pretty worn out at this point, and I had a bad feeling about a small cloudbank I saw creeping in over the western horizon, so I turned my sights on Jupiter for a bit, wayyyy high in the northwest, north of the shop roof, and called it a night.

I disconnected the autoguider and brought it inside with me. I’ll test it at the kitchen table before it goes back to the scope (where it will have to be focused again — I should have brought the whole rig in but I was mad).

Jupiter was gorgeous. The sky stayed clear until after 11:30.