Ad Astra Observatory

I’ve been working over Astromart again, trying to build up a “big boy” set of eyepieces, you know, for that public outreach I never do 🙂

Anyway, so far I’ve picked up a couple of Nagler Type 1 eyepieces; a huge 13mm and a much more reasonable-but-still-large 7mm. I have also started my collection of Powermates, with a 2.5x (which is 1.25″ form factor), a 4x (2″ form factor). Honorable mentions go to a Televue Big Barlow and 55mm Plössl, both 2″ form factor.

I’d never owned a 2″ eyepiece before. They are Big.

The original reason I was looking on the ‘mart, though, was to find a Moonlite focuser for Cassie. Last spring’s run really got me thinking about upgrading the focuser (image shift stinks), and when I got autofocusing working under the new software stack (Sequence Generator Pro FTW!), I knew it was time to get this upgrade done with. I never did find an SCT focuser I wanted on the ‘mart, so I ended up buying a new one from Moonlite. It showed up today, along with the first clear sky in awhile (I’m not counting the night the astro-gods teased me, clearing up at midnight… grr), so I knew it was time to swap scopes.

This routine is always a bit of a pain; hunting down all the parts, getting finders and focusers all aligned, &c. The Moonlite dropped right into place, so that was nice and easy. I will still have to figure out how to position the external focuser relative to the integral one, but I was happy to get some pinpoints of light, eventually, so I’ll table that for now.

For the record, Cassie takes 2 counterweights, positioned about 1/3 of the way from the bottom of the CW shaft. I could probably add a third and get the moment arm a little shorter, but I was trying to get up and running.

So, with Pumpkin, I’d recently been enjoying nearly full automation; plate-solving, centering, auto-focus, dome synch… I was starting to wonder what I’d have to do around here.

Well, as usual, switching to a new set of gear caused a bit of headache — plate solving started working only after I got the finder and scope aligned manually (isn’t that the sort of thing plate solving is supposed to help with?!), centering is broken, auto-focus is broken… it took about 4 hours of hair pulling and teeth gnashing before I got any images on the disk.

It was pretty cool, watching the scope do its thing, in the security cameras. I even closed the hatch for awhile, to see if the seeing would improve (it seemed to).

While the scope was doing its thing, I put the 13mm Nagler on Kelly (had to tighten the mount a bit so the scope wouldn’t sag 😮 ) — M42, M45, and M31 were all amazing-looking in this new eyepiece. I’ll have to spend more time with it, when I’m not freezing and stressed out.

When I finally shut down (3 out of 5 images came out), I sent the auto-park commands to the dome, and noticed that “home” worked fine, but “close” didn’t seem to be. This is the newest part of the observatory, so I headed upstairs to figure out what the problem was. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but on a whim I decided to use the Brillo pad to clean the contacts.

…

they were covered in frost, and thus unable to make contact. Um, wow. Scrub, scrub, and the dome shut itself automatically when I got back to the console.

It was a crazy night. I hope the shot of M106 comes out. I have a lot of work to do, getting the software working again with the swapped scope.

Three days to Chinese New Year. Happy Spring, everyone.