[naskies (Dave)]

After spending more time setting up / tearing down equipment than actually imaging in recent months, I decided to set up a temporary tent observatory in my back yard.

The main tent is a Black Wolf Mojave SG6 which is split into a front screen room and rear bedroom. The screen room acts as my warm room and storage area, and is high enough for me to stand up in. The tent is extremely well designed with a *lot* of vents - it doesn't get muggy at all, even with the fly in full waterproof mode.

I leave the mount + scope uncovered during imaging, but during the day / cloudy nights it's covered by a towel (helps dry off any dew), a Telegizmos cover, a doonah, and a heavy duty tarp - all inside an OzTent CR2 cubicle. This is a bit overkill, but it gives me peace of mind that it's well-protected from both rain and sun.

Both tents do get a little warm during the day with direct sunshine, but I discovered an unexpected benefit - the heat discourages and/or kills any insects that try to move in. No wanted guests so far!

For power, I've just run a 30 m extension cord into the tent to top up the deep cycle battery when needed. The tent is too far from the house for wifi, so I've run a Cat6 patch cable out to an Airport Express wifi base station.

I'm imaging with an adaptive optics unit using an OAG with 0.1 sec exposures, which means that Maxim DL loses the guide star and starts alarming immediately when clouds pass through. Whether I'm sleeping in the tent, or home in bed, I just have Remote Desktop connected to the laptop with the volume turned up to wake me up - this has already worked quite well.

To compensate for not being able to just look up at the sky or see where the telescope is pointing (while building a pointing model), I've used an SBIG ST-i guide camera with 6 mm C-mount lens to give me a 60x45 degree FOV. It's wide enough that I can see about 2-3 constellations (like a Telrad finder). My main imaging camera's field of view represents 5x5 pixels, which is enough to land a target on there by hand. With looping 1 sec exposures, I can see the horizon, passing clouds, planes, satellites, etc.

I've had this set up for about 2-3 weeks now - so far so good. It's weathered through both hot days and rainy days (about 100-150 mm of rain so far - still bone dry) without a problem. We haven't had any gale force winds yet, but I'm confident it'll be fine as the spot is protected from strong winds on all sides.

The best part of this set up though is that I can pack it all up, drive out to my usual dark site, and have the identical system up and running within a couple of hours. In theory, anyway... first test will be this weekend. The power extension cord just goes into the generator instead of power point, and substitute 3G data for wifi.

I'm currently building my own all-sky camera to improve horizon visibility, and also saving up for a motorised focuser and camera rotator for better automation.