[jamespierce (James)]

Flats

With the refactor I used a Flip-Flat which worked very well and acted as a dust cap as well. Then when I shifted to the reflector I changed to the wall mounted Spike-A Flat. Both are easily controlled by a simple command line script via USB which makes automating flats through ACP pretty simple. They run as soon as the dome closes at astronomical twilight in the morning. The only complex bit for me was figuring out how to turn the wall panel on and off given the whole dome rotates with the Scope Dome design.

Humidity

It's a Coolbreeze unit which the guys at Damp Solutions helped spec. I've written a script using the dome's humidity sensor, when it shuts down everything else it checks and if it's above 65% it runs for 5min. Then it checks again and either stops, or keeps going for another 5min. After 2hrs it stops regardless.

For much of the year it doesn't run but even through summer there are some pretty humid/damp nights. Everything still gets wet during the observing run of course but it means the mirrors and electronics etc get dried out pretty quickly. Through winter I have it run for 30min every day mid morning just to keep the general damp or mold at bay given it might not open for weeks at a time when the weather gets grim.


Getting your whole setup working really smoothly when it's close to hand will save you a huge amount of heartache later on! It would be ideal for all our remote telescopes to be somewhere really remote, edge of a desert, top of a mountain etc but the reality is there are always niggles to attend to - more so when you are setting up.