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Jase, Gary - thanks for your thoughts!
Yes - I am going insane with this - plus cloud cover has been about 76 of the last 80 days!
I did Ghost of Jupiter last night - short shots and was very pleased with the result. Move onto M83 at 6-8 minutes exposures unguided and I saw slight star trails!
The mount (a Vixen Atlux on a large pier) is good enough - its hand controller at 130 pages is just not well documented enough!
Gary - MaxPoint can hold many more than 50 stars - you can model on hundreds of stars using your own sky control program and just manually adding adjustment points; but yes I am beginning to realise it doesn't have the smarts of Tpoint - which I will likely buy in the comming months.
Also the SkySensor2000-PC models and corrects for the airs refraction and /or the different motion rates of stars, planets, the moon and satelites if you program the last. But it's barely even documented! I don't know how well it does it!
I realise too that I started at the real deep end - imaging at long focal length rather than on an 80mm apo at 500mm - 800mm. Call me a machoist!
To I haven't been able to get all teh weak points out of my gear yet, some examples:
1. I walk around my pier - if I stand on it at the South West side - stars move 20 arc seconds or more - bolting it through pavers onto a large concret block was a truly dump idea! I should put bolts on hard against the pavers themselves, rest the base of the mount on these four bolts & washers, then lock bolt it on top. That would be much more secure!
2. There is small slop in DEC - I can re-position the worm a bit closer and get better pointing and alignment.
3. I will add a feathertouch fine focuser and eventually buy a good apo of reasonable size - I think I just missed out what I wanted by a day in fact!
4. I will add Tpoint and have asked Ray Gralak to change PEMPro's polar alignment wizard to run via MaximDL with a minimum shot duration of 1/1,000 of a second (present minimum is 1 second) - so I could polar align during the day (Ray says this is an easy fix).
5. I will keep on trying to find out what the two numeric compensation parameters of the Atlux in Polar aligned mode are - and how they affect tracking and pointing.
I will practise, practise, practise and eventually get a better (likely self guiding S-BIG camera) and/or do on axis guiding with a giant Lumicon on axis guider.
But bottom line I want some fun now - there has been alot of set-up, now I want it to work. I want to be doing tuned imaging soon!
Matthew
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