…with zero dropped subframes.

I spent a little time refining the polar alignment last night. I am still getting some drift while running unguided; I calculated it to be about 6′ from the pole now.

The guiding is even smoother now, if one could believe it possible.

I shot 20m subframes all night. I ended up with 5 frames of M51 (OK, but not worth posting). By the time M51 was finished (around 2am), Cygnus was up, and so I went and grabbed 10(!) more frames of Sh2-101.

The 3h 20m image came out pretty nice, but as always it could use some more integration time:

This is one of my standard 1500×1000 -> 900×600 crop-and-size jobs. There was a lot more context in the image, but Veronica is badly out of collimation at the moment, so there were some badly mangled stars; this is as good as I could get.

Things I noted last night:
- the pier topper needs to be rotated about 1/2″ clockwise, because the azimuth adjustment has run out of room to the west.
- Veronica needs to be recollimated. I am going to pull the long bolts and put the stock ones back in. I think I’m done with the RCC/OAG.
- I am not certain if it did anything bad, but I pulled the webcam out of the OAG and put it into the main focuser partway through the night. I would think that it doesn’t matter where in the FOV the star lies, but better safe than sorry.
- I will not be putting the mount on the tripod for tonight’s star party. I think it’s more impressive on the pier.
- One of the GOTOs last night was so accurate that I looked in the finder, couldn’t find the star, started pushing it around with the hand controller, and realized it was sitting behind the crosshairs. (:
- The mount put up more gaudy numbers; 0.4″ RMS for the night. wow.

A good night. And I got an hour more sleep and still hit a Cygnus target!

Ah, maintenance.
Things you do on sunny days and cloudy nights.

I spent some time getting Trixie in collimation today.

It came together pretty well with the Catseye.

It’s clear that the collimation shifts as the rig changes its “down” vector. I am not sure how to keep this from happening, but I think it stays pretty close at this point. Worth rebuilding.

The secondary is oversized. When all is collimated, I can see part of the focuser board in the secondary.

I stuck a post-it triangle onto the primary. That helped the center spot and the Catseye worked a lot better.

I am looking forward to trying out Trixie on the stars again. I will be interested to see how much the collimation shifts; will it affect pointing? I am thinking probably not. It’s real close.

I spent a long time collimating Veronica the other day, with the new autocollimator I bought. That experience convinced me to buy Bob’s Knobs for Veronica and Cassie.

I knew I would have to recollimate afterwards, but I was ready, at least in the case of Veronica, because I knew she was in collimation before I started, so I knew that I would only have to adjust the secondary to get her back in collimation.

Cassie is a different story, but that’s OK, too. I’m out of the night sky business for awhile, so I have plenty of time to get everything fixed up.

I was worried that collimation would take a lot of time after the install. Starting from a good base, it was really quick. Took maybe 20 minutes from the time I removed the first screw to the time I declared Veronica back in collimation and put her back outside.

Not bad. And the new Knobs really make adjustment easy.

Totally worth it.

I had a bunch of maintenance piling up in the obvservatory, so I decided to do some of it since it’s raining all weekend.

I spent a little time getting the mount more level, and adjusting the elevation on the polar alignment. I still don’t think it’s perfect, but I think I’m closer.

The polar alignment still needs adjustment in azimuth, and a final check in elevation.

I installed the new EEPROM (v1.04; apparently 1.05 is only from Goerlich) and a new battery in the mount. I also hooked up the GPS and got the time and location correct.

I mounted up the new autoguider and tried to take a couple of daytime shots to test it out, but the observatory computer fried, so I spent the time to rebuild the observatory machine from the ground up. That took longer than I expected, but I think it’s up and running now. I was having an awful time trying to get VNC to work properly. It was running really slowly on a fresh install of Win XP SP3. After much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, I rebooted all the elements of the LAN (modem, router, etc), tweaked the firewall on the new machine, and installed several Windows and Dell updates. Something in there “clicked”, and now it’s up again and fast as ever.

I took the C9.25 to a local park and set up the artificial star about 75yd away. That was more than enough to get me in focus, and with a few tweaks of the collimation knobs, I saw, for the first time, *perfect* Airy disks! I was collimating at 700x, so gorgeous. The C9.25 is ready for… something. It’s back in its (new) case for now, but ready to rock.

Buoyed by that success, I decided to try to collimate Veronica, too. This was not as successful. I will have to read up on collimation, because the closest I could get to Airy disks was seeing little tiny “crosses” (even on the dimmest light), which merged “vertical” if I went one way out of focus, and “horizontal” if I went the other way. There is a ton of light being thrown off outside of the 4 main diffraction spikes, too. I think I’m closer, but I will be using the C9.25 or Pumpkin to do polar alignment and pointing models for awhile…

A very productive weekend, despite only having 90 minutes of clear sky.

Newtonian secondary mirror offset

I have never really understood the thing about “if you use a sight tube, you’ve already done this”. But this is the best treatment I’ve seen so far.

I spent some time this afternoon tuning Trixie. The collimation job is a but tougher with the open-frame scope; each turnbuckle is a collimation adjustment point. It took a lot of tweaking to get the scope to hold collimation in all points of the sky. I got close, but it will take some more work.

I shot a couple of test images to see what was up, and was getting some very strange star images in-focus. I was trying to get a shot of M42 to show off, but decided to take an out-of-focus image of one of the stars in Orion’s belt to demonstrate the problem I’m seeing:

Looks like the optics might not be centered in the tube. More tuning required.

The skies cleared again tonight! Second time in a week, with about 2 weeks of continual rain going on around them. Interesting.

The moon is one day before 1st quarter, so I got a good chance to get Trixie out and took a peek at the moon for the first time with her. Very nice. Here’s the photo:

From this photo, I could see by inspection that the scope is out of collimation. To confirm, I shot a photo of Aldebaran:

No problem. I will spend tomorrow tuning.

Once I’d convinced myself that Trixie is ready for a tuneup, I decided to use the rest of the clear sky to do some imaging. Since Veronica+Pumpkin+guider is not really working, I mounted up Pumpkin by herself (a first!) and set up for some Ha widefields in the winter Milky Way.

I should have some pixels of M42 and The Rosette on the way… but that’s another post.

It’s good to be under the sky again. Very clean air out there tonight.

I can’t believe it. You would not believe how hard it was raining today. There was standing water on some of the stuff inside the observatory where it blew in the roller holes (nothing got damaged — thank you, plastic containers!).

At sunset, it was still raining on and off.

So after a day of telescope maintenance, I decided to try to collimate the C9.25, too; why not? When the kids headed off to bed, I started to get set up, went outside to grab the OTA, and…

a whole-sky suckerhole opened up.

I mean, seriously, like gorgeous and glittery and clear, horizon to horizon.

So, not taking all this too seriously, I went out, dismounted Veronica/Pumpkin, mounted up Trixie, had to install the focuser and finder, and set about lining up the finder and main scope.

This, by the way, is a real pain. I mean, generally speaking, this is something that just takes a serious amount of time, unless the moon is up (5 day moon today, behind the tree, no dice). So I swept around with the main scope until I stumbled across M42 (that took a long time), and tried to get the finder lined up. It just… wouldn’t… go. Like the bracket I had it attached to wasn’t quite square or something.

But I figured out how to get it close enough (”if I hold the finder bracket as hard as I can in this particular direction, then it will be the same as the main scope, kinda”) to test whether I still had a flexure problem. Things looked… promising, so since the sky was holding up, I decided to mount the finder “for real”.

I’m pretty proud of my ingenious solution to the problem, pictured here:

I mounted the finder dovetail bracket onto a Losmandy DA (found some teeny screws that would work, and the holes lined up and everything, it was precious), and re-mounted Trixie’s top rail to hold the DA.

Then I went back to work lining up the finder again, and wouldn’t you know it lined up right away this time! w00t.

So, M42 (high in the southwest), in the finder, in the main scope — check.

Slew over to Mars (did I mention I’m doing all this without the mount turned on? Don’t get me started), Mars (high in the east) in the finder scope, also in the main scope — check. Not centered, but we’ll get to that later.

Slew over to Dubhe (low in the north), in the finder, in the main scope — check. Even more not centered, but still, at this point, I’m getting pretty excited, but one more test…

Slew over to Caph (low in the west), in the finder, in the main scope — check! OK, way not centered, but still within the FOV of the main scope.

Just for funsies, slew to M45 (The Pleiades), in the finder, in the main scope… check. Gorgeous at 1500mm. The eyepiece awash in stars, I can almost fit the naked-eye asterism into the 32mm eyepiece. More stars than I felt like counting.

And there was much rejoicing and the eating of fruit bat and orangutan.

So the whole “not centered” thing. At this point, I am going to rack it up to some tweaking that needs to happen with all the turnbuckles, etc. The top DUP plate didn’t seat properly and I didn’t take the time to fix it. It’s close, but I need to loosen all the turnbuckles, then get the plate installed, then re-tighten the turnbuckles, then collimate. Then I will start worrying about “it’s centered over here but not over here”.

The finder and main scope can now be aligned close enough that I got every target I looked for. I’m willing to believe that some more tuning will produce a nice, stiff, repeatable collimation that I will enjoy for years to come.

…

Now let’s talk about the weather.

What. In. The. Name. Of. Plato?!

Who ever heard of “worked all day on the scope in the rain”, followed by “then it cleared up at night when I needed to test”?!

Whoever is responsible, I thank you. Maybe the astronomy gods just figured I’d paid my dues on Trixie, and if I didn’t get to test my fixes, I may never get back to it. (: Whatever the reason, I’m really, really glad I got to test tonight.

Because Trixie is on the verge of moving from the “ATM” category into the “Gear” category, and that will be really, really cool.

Sky’s still clear, but I am wiped out after a day of wrestling that scope, and I am worried that I’ll break something by getting too excited when the scope still needs tweaking and some safety checks.

I leave you, my audience, with this, a photo of Trixie “in situ”, in a position that “just barely clears the roof”.

Good night, Trixie.

Clear Sky Clock said it would be cloudy all night, so of course it stayed 90% clear until about midnight, when it socked in. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I decided to get the autoguider up and running tonight. I wanted everything focused and aligned so that I can get started shooting again for real.

On top of this desire, my new clip-in Ha filter showed up today, and I really wanted to try it out!

So I hooked up the autoguider, got it all focused and balanced the rig. I booted up the scope, which wanted to cold-start again. No problem. Quick slew to Betelgeuse… and that’s where the problems started.

For some reason, the main scope and its finder (which were aligned as recently as 2 days ago, and have not been touched) are no longer in alignment. No problem; I see the star in the finder, I’ll just sweep the scope around until I find it.

No dice.

I don’t know what my problem was, but I tried everything I could think of, including sweeping the scope by hand, and I could not find *anything*. It took me 40 minutes to finally stumble over Rigel and then get the finder and scope aligned. While that was in the vicinity, I set up the guide scope to be roughly aligned, too.

As part of this fun, I figured out that the reticle is not centered in the guiding eyepiece. Again. That is a silly feature. But I figured out how to get it centered, so now the guide finder, guide scope, and reticle eyepiece all agree about the center of the field. Which is nice.

So after losing about 45 minutes of clear sky, I got the scope turned on and started an alignment run… the deep cycle battery died. argh. OK, set up the 15v power supply — deal with the battery later. Now I’m working the alignment (oh, I had mis-calculated GMT earlier in the evening, too — I was having a bit of a day), and the polar alignment is way off compared to a few days ago. Pulled out the polar alignment scope illuminator, and it’s got a busted power cable. Again. That is the worst design ever. I decided to just go forward with it; I’ll deal with polar alignment later. I need to be using my Gizmo anyway. Where is that thing? hmm…

OK, so I’m aligned. I boot up the computer, and shoot a test image of Betelgeuse through the Ha filter. It is of course not in focus. No problem. Fire up FocusMax (nothing can go wrong with the focuser — it’s on COM1), and …

all of the FocusMax windows show up offscreen. I have no idea why. I even tried to Regedit them into place; no dice. Meanwhile, tick, tick, tick, clear sky still, but I can see clouds moving in. Also, Orion is now well past meridian. grr!

Fine. I fire up the focuser in MaxIM (I tried to get the ST-4 and mount working in MaxIM, too, but needed to reinstall the USB-to-Serial drivers for reasons passing understanding, and never got that working right — you guessed it, deal with it later), did an autofocus run in MaxIM for the first time ever.

Let me say at this point that I really like the new MaxIM focus routine. It brings up a V-curve just like FocusMax, and while it seems to converge on a solution a little more slowly, it does seem to get there pretty well, as evidenced by the fact that in just a few minutes, I had autofocused the Ha filter on Betelgeuse! (FWHM of ~5.5, high winds and encroaching clouds and sketchy collimation, so give me a break, this is about what I usually get)

So I fired a 40sec exposure of Betelgeuse, so I could see some diffraction spikes, and got a bright fuzzy ball with lots of stars in the background. I looked up, and couldn’t even see the star through the cloud cover. OK, I get it. So I slewed over to M42 anyway, because I was going to make sure I was in focus.

A couple of 40sec and then 2min frames of M42 looked pretty good given they were clearly destroyed by clouds.

I tried to set up the ST-4, but it spent a lot of time losing the star and giving me “E E” followed by “-E -E” type corrections, so I turned it off. I only like guiding in MaxIM if I can help it.

At this point, it was about midnight, and we get to where I started this post… socked in solid with clouds, and no images to show for it.

And a longer todo list.

But a few more things are set up again, including of all things, the autofocus routine in MaxIM! Cool.

Fingers crossed for a clear night this weekend. Next one won’t be wasted.

The camera is out there capturing an unguided shot of M42 for the RCC’s first light image.

…and here it is. As usual, it’s another M42. This is 30 frames, 2 minutes each, unguided (total of 1 hour exposure time)

From the test frames, I can tell that there is still some stuff that needs adjustment. Focus was a little rough (just eyeballed it), and I can tell that the camera is not pointing at the center of the main mirror, because the RCC is showing a slightly curved focal plane on the left-hand side of the image, but nice and flat on the right.

Generally, the RCC looks like a winner. I would have to shoot against the MPCC to see if it does the same thing.

I’m guessing that I need to work collimation and focus before I can really give this corrector a run for its money. Not to mention setting up some guiding.

I also set up Pumpkin with a DUP. With the DUP, the rings, the motor, and a 2” diagonal, Pumpkin weighs in at a hefty 10#. But that’s still pretty light, considered. I am really looking forward to cruising the winter Milky Way in Ha like I did through Cygnus and Cepheus this summer.

I sent off the OAG for repair today.
I await the clip-in Ha filter, so I can do narrowband with Veronica, too.
Mount could use some tweaks to the polar alignment. I need to find the Gizmo.

So I’m easing back into astronomy. The shed is still a mess, and things aren’t all set up yet, but I’m getting closer.