The SCGO Serenity Observatory Imaging Kit was disassembled for maintenance and possible upgrades as the forecast was rain rain rain snow for the next serveral days.
And then of course clear skies open up Sunday evening!
I hastily reassembled the imaging kit and performed the long awaited 3 star alignment. The Skywatcher mount picked Sirius, Mirfak and Procyon.
That seemed a little notspreadapartenough but I did it and when completed it said: alignment complete… it may be poor.. which I have never seen before.
We had some discussion at the Wed RASCKC inperson meeting about 1, 2 and 3 star aligns but I did not understand it well enough to know which is best or if you should just always go and do 3 star?
So .. still no real test of the pointing as there was not enough time to park it shut it down and restart.
So instead I just went to Jupiter and used the nowworking finderscope and camera to get Jupiter within 5 seconds! Love it!
I think I am going to start using another qualifier of seeing… how well Jupiters north and south equatorial belts appear raw on the display. Last night was much better than the last session. Seeing was maybe average to poor, transparency was average.
The really really great news… again, after the polar align of the mount last time around, again two runs of 180 seconds each did not require any manual guiding… the tracking is really really good!
This was the best 10% of 18K frames.. .the annotation seems to be broken again ????
Altitude was only 26 degrees and the airmass was 2.3.. it is getting sooo close to the end of Jupiter season!
There is a little bright spot on the lower left of Jupiter, right near the limb. It *may* have been Europa just starting a transit over Jupiter moving left to right.