So how do I know when it is working ?
After our weather bomb Saturday Sunday turned into an absolute stunner of a day with promise of a similar night.
I set up Skeletope with the 80 on top and hooked up the laptop, GPUSB and the Neximage and when it got dark started to play around. Very frustrating !!
Even with a focal reducer the FOV for guiding is quite small. I may build a new wider field guide scope from some parts I have. (Also the 80 on top really upsets the weight balance.)
Nonetheless I finally got it all going, star on screen, green boxed and counting and it seemed to really lock on and hold position.
But, there was no indication of that anywhere. The only possible thing was the frame counter in the lower status bar, at 2 secs it was running up to 62-63 frames. Does this indicate that all is working correctly ?
It seemed to be holding position extremely well and I had a short watch after the session with PHD all turned off and I think it showed some slight drift but I think I got the SCP alignment so dang good in the first place that there was little movement.
I also found out that Skeletope is still too long for the DSLR to make focus. Miscalculated some thing there obviously.
Better get the hacksaw out again. Might try lifting the mirror first, nice thing about open trussed scopes is that access to everything is easy !!
The weather is still looking good for this evening so might be out there again tonight.
Oh, ..... and I looked at some stars as well ....
