Ad Astra Observatory

I was able to boot up FocusMax tonight and just go directly to “find star” and then “focus” and then “run 10 V-curves”. It had no problem finding a star, getting it into the bounding box, and then focusing in on it.

I set the exposure time back to 5s. That is working great. Given how bright the star it found is at even 500 steps out-of-focus, I might even move it down to 3s. Probably 1s would be fine near focus, but it would do a lot of thrashing out near the ends. There is probably a happy medium exposure length where the thrashing at the ends is minimal but the focus run goes faster.

For the first time, I got FocusMax to actually focus using the Focus button. That was really cool. It took 283s to make it happen. That was with 8s exposures. I bet with 5s, it would be about halve that, and with 3s, even faster.

Nice. Things are starting to come together. Maybe. (: