Ad Astra Observatory

Let us say that the night culminated in me recollimating my telescope at 1:45 am. That about sums up “how it went”. 

At sunset, there was a rather large sucker hole over the house, so I decided to head out, but with darkness falling not until 9:30, and one thing and another, I got a late start. 

The RPi was still running, but it had lost its WiFi again, so I threaded in dealing with that with the rest of it. It’s working again but I am looking forward to Ethernet. 

My current park position is irritating. The mount doesn’t know if it’s east or west, and always seems to default to the wrong one. There is a workflow issue there, but in the end, I manually pointed the scope at M13, and synced the mount. 

Then I started running into camera problems again. The DSLR would connect to MaxIM, and would shoot the exposure, but would then lock up trying to download the image. This took a moment to figure out. Meanwhile, I tried PHD Guiding, to take the strain of guiding off of MaxIM. That worked fine, just like it says on the box, more or less. The SSAG seems to need to cool down a bit before it can take good images. Mental note. 

Cartes du Ceil did fine, although it got a little confused about where the pointer was pointing, and I couldn’t get it to lock back in. Shrug. Will figure that out later. 

What with one thing and another, the clock was certainly ticking, and when I finally tried a new home run USB cable, it was already pretty late. That worked great, and I was immediately downloading images. Woot!

Shot my first 60 second frame of M13…

Huge coma all in the same direction, all the way across the field. Clearly, there was something horribly wrong with the collimation of the scope, or else the camera was super tilted. 

Oh, I nearly forgot. Trixie’s open frame really does a number on the camera, letting in a ton of stray light. So I also had to go through and cover all the status LEDs with tape, to keep them from washing out the images. 

So coma makes all the stars look like Christmas trees, and normally if this is happening, it means that the camera is tilted in some direction. So I played around with that for awhile, then came to the conclusion that the scope must be out of collimation, so I went back to basics, and loosened up the secondary, spent longer than I should have getting it aligned (there are a lot of confusing reflections going on, making it hard to tell when “you’re there”), moved on to the primary, aligned it using The Laser, realized that the secondary needed more tweaking, redid all of that, that threw the primary off, of course, redid all of that, got it all done, popped the Cheshire back in to confirm, things looked great, mounted the camera back up, hopped downstairs, shot a frame…

…and I had traded Christmas trees for perfect little donuts. Yes, I admit, perfect little donuts is Not what I’m looking for, exactly, but donuts just means you’re out of focus, which in theory is an easy thing to fix. 

Unless you’re me, and FocusMax is your longtime nemesis. 

I spent the next don’t know how long, trying to get it to go through a first light wizard. As usual, that did nothing but burn starlight. I finally gave up in disgust when FocusMax locked up and could not be switched to or shut down, manually swung the scope around to the moon, and focused in like 10 seconds. I gave FM one more chance, but it was Very Sad by this point, so I rebooted the VM, shut everything down, and called it a night. 

You win this time, Sky, but I will be back. You can’t hide in plain sight forever.