Ad Astra Observatory

So I spent some time doing polar alignment today. This has to be my least favorite astronomy activity. It’s so impossible to tell whether you’re dead-on or not, and there is so much centering of this and bending down to look at that and … ick. I hate polar alignment.

So as far as I know, when I started the night, I was at A:4 E:8, according to the Gemini. That’s a deviation of about 9′ from the NCP, not bad for visual work, but really junk for a permanently-mounted rig in an observatory.

So I started with Gemini’s Polar Alignment Assist routine (that’s the one that rquires no pointing model). I played with that for awhile, and found out that it stinks. Which I already knew.

Gave up and drift aligned for awhile. That stinks too, but at least I feel like I’m getting somewhere.

Then I decided to try WCS, which got me to boot up the NexImage for the first time in I don’t know how long. All in all, it was a fun experience. I should have hung in there for some more iterations, but it was getting late and I wanted to know how I did.

So I built a pointing model. A nice big one, with about 10 stars or so from all over the sky.

…

A:5 E:4, or about 6.5′ from the NCP.

Better, but not worth 4 hours of crouching in the dark. Especially when the next clear night is… um… who knows when?

Next time, all WCS all the time until I get the thing dead on. I’m going to leave out the 3x Barlow this time. I think it adds flexure. Besides, aligning at 600x is a bit overkill.

Next.