16" Dall-Kirkham rebuild

[Stefan Buda]

The heating ring for the finder is done and installed.
It has 55 ohms resistance and that dissipates about 2.6 watts of heating power at 12V.

[Stefan Buda]

Last night I achieved first light of sorts.
After fine tuning the polar alignment, using a broomstick as a crowbar for nudging the pier supports, I went on to tweak the collimation and finally I even did a bit of lunar imaging.
It wasn't smooth sailing though. The mount in this configuration is much more prone to vibrations and resonances. I was driving the RA axis with an Arduino Uno/DRV8825 and getting vibrations that were interfering with the imaging.
Once I changed from 1/16 micro stepping to 1/32 and adjusted the current draw, things were ok, but I will need to do some vibration dampening work.

[JA]

Stefan, you went to the moon last night

Best
JA

[Joshua Bunn (Joshua)]

Thanks fir the updates, Stefan. I'm enjoying following. Crisp capture of the moon!

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Very impressive first light Stefan, I imagine the results will be spectacular once you've sorted out the remaining niggles.

[Stefan Buda]

Originally Posted by JA

Stefan, you went to the moon last night

Best
JA

I'm afraid, this it is the only way for me to space travel. I was born 50 years too soon, otherwise I would be lining up to get on Musk's Starship.

Originally Posted by Joshua Bunn

Thanks fir the updates, Stefan. I'm enjoying following. Crisp capture of the moon!

Thanks Josh, it was a difficult capture as I was only able to correct the RA drift and the Moon drifts in both axes. I have ordered a cheap CNC shield that I will write some code for, and I will be able to make DEC corrections too. On the longer run, I will use a OnStep controller, just at the moment I don't feel like sorting out the multitude of versions that exist.

Originally Posted by Andy01

Very impressive first light Stefan, I imagine the results will be spectacular once you've sorted out the remaining niggles.

Thanks Andy, the main niggles will be with the recoating of the primary mirror as my vacuum chamber can fit max 10" mirrors.

[Rod]

Looks really impressive Stefan. Despite your concern about remaining niggles, the Moon image looks terrific. I’m looking forward to seeing more images from it.

Rod

[Stefan Buda]

Originally Posted by Rod

Looks really impressive Stefan. Despite your concern about remaining niggles, the Moon image looks terrific. I’m looking forward to seeing more images from it.

Rod

Thanks Rod,

I posted another image, from the same night, in the solar system section.

I also found a mistake in my Arduino code that was contributing to the drift in the tracking.