[Kokatha man]

Never sure where you should put some of the posts sometimes, so put it in here; if anyone wants to comment or take it in their own direction I guess that's fine, it may uncover something for me or others.

After all the hassles and #@**! of customs and freight "agencies" - perhaps that should read "profiteers" - I finally got my Round Table Platform from Brian Reed: these are the new motor versions featuring a crystal frequency locked drive motor. Brian believes these to give an even better performance for his EQ platforms that already have a highly regarded reputation.

Yesterday, as well as handling all the things that fill a day regardless of AA; I managed to make three locating/aligning rings for the "feet" of the platform (essentially 3 CD ply rings with profiled edges and a central hole that snuggly accepts the platform's round, adjustable feet.) This meant that today I had to lay a smooth sheet onto my observation deck (covering the reed decking) to facilitate the eventual affixing to said deck of these locating rings.

Bright moon tonight, but no impediment to drift aligning the EQ platform: but boy is it somewhat different to the HEQ5 Pro mount - no fine alt/az adjustment screws here Boris!

Although east and west and north/south are easily ascertained, I still managed to get myself in knots with my "vernier" adjustments of the platform - and resorted to that old maxim of "stop trying to rationalize the adjustments needed and just adjust, note whether it's correcting the drift(s) and compensate on the hoof so to speak"- the "vernier" adjustments for E-W drift being me manually twisting/rotating the platform base! (with the 3 locating rings I had made in place on each platform foot)

North-South drift was a little more refined: raising and lowering the rear (northern) adjustable foot of the EQ base!

My intention was to "nail" the drift alignment (ha-ha) and then, drill and driver at hand, screw the platform feet's locating rings to the deck for subsequent fast set-ups. I'm interested in taking wide-angle images of the skies to create a mosaic of the constellations for a project I'm developing - not using a scope, just employing the platform as a camera mount (see "Emu on the march" thread.)

I'm really not sure how well these EQ platforms can be aligned, but I'm going to "push the envelope" before I permanently affix my locaters to the deck; tonight was somewhat ambitious re my hopes of getting it done; though it was the wind that created my major impediment. That and the realization that I am going to have to improve my dob's motion re "friction/stickion" as well as develop the ideas I espoused in the dob slo-mo control thread. Have already plotted a course of action in my mind with these two issues!

Called it a night after accurately marking the position of the platform locating rings with the best alignment I could achieve tonight - I'll wait for a calm night, jeez these gully winds can be a pain in the butt down here!

As I said, I'm unsure how well I can set the alignment of the platform; I'd be interested to hear whether anyone else has wrestled with this objective.

From a rough assessment of the accuracy, calculating the I/R ep's true field of view at 24', I was able to limit the drift to approx 20 arc seconds over 5 minutes E-W, with no north-south movement discernable. Hoping to improve on this figure next time, but would be interested to hear what others who have done this think. (the type of imaging I intend to do would most probably handle this accuracy: yes/no?)

Cheers, Darryl.