Ad Astra Observatory

Because I’ve made so much progress on the observatory of late, I was looking over my Bookmarks, to see if anything needed updating.

Trixie (look in the tag cloud) is on-hold right now. I want to make sure that the software stack is working perfectly before I try tackling the last of the flexure. So, Pumpkin (who is a better winter-seasonal scope in my book) got a nice long run as I started bringing all the new gear up to speed. It helps that Pumpkin gives a lot of room for error; nearly 3″/px means that some really ugly 2″ seeing can be bouncing the sky around, and Pumpkin just keeps rolling.

And as I keep hanging on to this never-ending telescope build, I am sometimes reminded why I try.

The caption is from another beautiful night, but what caught my eye was that this was

Trixie, 5 min subframes, Unguided.

Stars look pretty round to me. M27 was pretty nice, too.

I think this scope can fly. But I need to know that the mount and the software are right. Then we can start playing. I need my workbench back. Or, I could mount Trixie to the wall. Oh, the possibilities. 🙂

But, for now, sleep. Good girl. I’ll be back soon.