Ad Astra Observatory

After spending some of my bonus last year on a new telescope, I spent a long (long) time getting the observatory ready to run with the new rig.

There’s a story here, but suffice it to say that I decided that my hobby is “astrophotography” and not “amateur telescope making”, so I shelved Trixie in favor of a commercially-available option.

Yeah, so it took a year to get the hardware rig mounted, balanced, focused, and the software rig rebuilt from the ground up (now it’s Windows 10, yay). I missed all the clear sky last fall and this winter, but finally last night I was ready to roll.

I was pleased to find that both autofocus(!) and plate solving (!!) “just worked”, out of the box. That was really pleasant. The dome and telescope need to be more calibrated and aligned to each other (dome was going to the wrong spot when slaved), so I knew I was going to have to fly the rig manually (at least for the dome rotation part of the process).

Beauty is a 12″ Newtonian with blazing fast f/4 optics (1200mm focal length). She’s a little smaller than Trixie (1500mm), but still fills that “about one degree” field that has been ably filled by Veronica (1000mm) and Trixie in the past. I super love this focal length (1000-1500mm), as it produces a really nice FOV for DSLR.

I picked up M3 as a first target, because it’s super close to bright Arcturus, which makes finder alignment really easy. Second, I knew I was going to have to chase the dome manually, so I wanted to find a target that I could work with (turns out I should have found something a little more east and less south 😉 ).

Here’s a full crop of the object

Once M3 started moving off west, I pointed back east again so as not to deal with meridian flips, and by then the summer Milky Way was rising, so I decided to go for broke and shoot some nebula. The still-bright full+3 moon rose about this time, and I was going after the always-dim Crescent Nebula (NGC6888), so I didn’t get much.

The object is large enough not to fit in a 1500×1000 crop at full zoom, so I cropped to 3000×2000 and resized to 1500×1000. I’m saying this is not a fullzoom crop, just “more zoom” 😉

I’m glad to have the rig up and running again. It feels like I can take advantage of clear nights as they arise, and welcome to Hilltop Observatory, Beauty!