Ad Astra Observatory

With Hilltop Observatory’s primary construction complete, I can now start getting ready for First Light, my first image of a “deep sky” object, or DSO, from the rig. 

There are several things that need to get set up before that can happen. The mount must be polar aligned, the telescope needs to be collimated, and the imaging rig needs to be strung and installed. There will be other milestones along the way, but those three are on the critical path between Hilltop Observatory and its first pretty picture. 

I will get to the roadmap in a bit, but first a few notes on the rest of the stuff going on in the building. 

First, the Junior Astronomer and I got to spend some time under the sky last night; Jupiter was too high for her to reach the eyepiece, but we looked at the moon and Venus together, and then I came back out to the shed after sending her to bed. The moon was a very pretty 4-day crescent, Venus was gibbous, and Jupiter, which I looked at, was looking pretty good, but it was too bright (pre sunset) to see any moons. I noticed that the image start to fall apart at higher magnifications, indicative of a scope that is out of collimation. More on that later.

Once the sun went down, I got down to the business of polar aligning 04026, the mount. As I mentioned before, I had leveled the mount to 47.7* based on the bubble level app in my iPhone, and that turned out to be decently close in declination, but the NJP has a very accurate polar axis reticle, so I unmounted Trixie and the counterweights, and got to work.

Let me state, for the record, once again, that I hate polar alignment. It makes me crazy, and I never know if I have gotten it perfect, and every tool that I have used to ensure good polar alignment only seems to make me hate it more. But, getting a good alignment to the north celestial pole is critical for taking good images, and it only has to be done once, so it’s worth taking a little time to get it as close as possible. 

So, between the polar reticle and the handy iPhone app that I have to tell me how to set Polaris within the reticle, I got the mount “pretty close” before the clouds rolled in on Wednesday night. Knowing that this is usually a multi-day process for me, I resolved myself to patiently wait for the next clear night to continue, and shut down for the night. 

As an aside, the observing deck is a lot more cramped with Trixie and the other gear up here, but it’s even more crowded when Trixie is not on the mount. You can do polar alignment with the full rig on board, and eventually, I will have to refine the alignment while the mount is loaded, but it’s a lot easier to push things around without having to fight 200# of gear, so I was happy to stumble around past the scope for a night or two. 

It rained and hailed on Thursday just before sunset, but then it cleared up again for a while, so I decided to come back out and fight the polar axis a little more. After an hour and a half of battle, I declared the alignment complete, and locked everything down. 

I decided to run the wiring harness for the camera rig, as it needed to get done, and doesn’t hurt anything. That went together pretty well; I had left the cables fairly organized when I pulled them off last time. The manual focuser is still installed, and I didn’t actually plug any of the rig in, but the cables are run, and they are hopefully not going to intrude into the light path or get hung up on the mount, so I call that a win. 

The clouds were starting to roll in by this time, but I decided to see if I could do any actual viewing before they socked in, and what with one thing and another, sucker holes, getting the dome positioned, and general rustiness, I was able to look at globular cluster M13 in Hercules for a few moments, before the sky went entirely grey. Woot! First DSO from the observatory! 

I parked the dome and scope, and am posting this log entry from the observing deck, while the wind whistles outside. 

Polar alignment, check. 

Imaging rig cabled up, check. 

Next step, collimate the scope. That can be done during daylight! Nice. 

Good night from Hilltop O.