Ad Astra Observatory

Since I overexposed my shot of M13 last time (I hope that I can pull in some dim, edge detail…), I had to wait for a few days to appease the astronomy gods after such a daring achievement. Oh, those rascals. 🙂

Jupiter is high and bright in the south. Arcturus was visible pretty early, 8:00 or so.

Once it got dark, I headed out to start getting a handle on the new boot-up sequence.

Open the shutter, oh the simple joy of manually operating the telescope.
Boot up the mount. There’s a whole thing. I don’t even want to talk about it (read: see Evernote).
Cartes du Ceil, connect telescope, sync mount, slew. You want this to start slewing to target first, for two reasons. First, You don’t want to link the dome at this point, or it might get confused. Second, this is 04026. You tell her goto, no meridian flip, and she goes. If the dome is going to get confused, I need a reference point. She’s it.

PHD Guide, connect guider. No point in looking for a star, yet, although if you have a certain control freak thing, you could have it start trying to find stars while shooting the inside of the dome. There are few.

POTH connect dome, link dome to telescope. Dome slew.

OK, a small digression, here, while I get the dome all calibrated and connected and such. Needs a little configuration-tweaking. Details. Backlog.

Dome as if by magic, is pointing the same direction as the telescope, and only 30º off this time, good boy Rover, let’s just get you back over here, ok? We’re going to count encoder ticks, and calibrate you right up. Tomorrow. I’m trying to get something done, here?

PHD find star, calibrate, guide. This is more an annoyance, have to wait for calibration to finish. Use 1s exposures (or better, .1s exposures..) and it goes faster.

Sequence Generator Pro, connect camera, 30s to plate solve, 5m subframes this time, so as not to overexpose. It’s a much bigger stack this time, 4h = 48 frames 😐

And then go blog about it.

I’m getting better at this again. The image processing could use a little tweak. But this is starting to come around.

The dome still makes me jump a little when it corrects every 10 minutes or so. “Hey, let’s keep it within 2º there, OK buddy?” “Duh, OK, Boss.” I built a machine. I mean, I put the parts together that someone else made, purpose-made to do this particular task. It wasn’t a kit, but it could have been. And some of it was. I can sit inside it. It doesn’t know I’m there. If it obeyed the laws of robotics, I could call it a robot. So even with a computer moving it around, it’s still just a machine. It’s not even the first machine I’ve had, that tracks the stars. But being inside it. A building with a rotating roof that tracks the stars.

Pretty sweet. Dome will be getting a name.

I set up the 350d with a star trails rig on the lawn outside the observatory. We’ll see what I get.