Fiiiinally got out last night to test the new rig properly
After an hours delay because nothing would turn on and eventually discovering that my extension cord had failed (I mean what are the chances??
) and after scampering back and forth in the dark through my hosts garage 120m away and an aborted replacement turned out to be a 15amp cord
....
I finally found a crappy looking daisy chained cable in their garage that would reach from my shed to the observatory....
..and plugged all the routed cables in..here we go..
After polar aligning using the neat new AP right angle polar scope (while comfortably seated! yaay!) and simply using my knowledge of the location of the SCP... I got both camera systems up and running and apart from verifying all my cabling was correct and both cameras and guiders were back online, I was fiiiinally able to test the tracking and guiding quality and dithering and general mount responsiveness.
Coming from the amazing NJP I wasn't expecting any ground breaking improvements. I am happy to say though that while the the basic sidereal tracking quality was similar, the responsiveness of the big AP1600 is markedly better, dither moves of 3 pixels between subs took generally around 10sec or so to recentre and start, previously the NJP would take up to 30 or 40sec or sometime more to get back on target
I centered a focus star near the zenith just east of the meridian, through the AG12, on a retical and watched, it took about 10min to move off the crosshairs, so the PA scope and my knowledge of the SCP location, works pretty well
Any periodic error was not decernable above last nights seeing (which was not very good)
The collimation of the AG12 (using CATSEYE tools) was good and after its trip back to FLI for a clean room service, the big 16803 chip was now clean and free of the previous, small amount but annoying icing in one corner.
Unfortunately I am having issues with getting gotos to work properly...clearly I have not setup some parameters properly but it was approaching 2am so I decided to pack up and work this out another night...
All in all happy that the main use of this system ie imaging, will be of high quality
Mike