Thoughts from Starlight Cascade

With the installation of a custom metal adapter, the moonlight focuser is now mounted to the Vixen VC200L cassegrain scope. The old focuser was disconnected from power and remains in place.

Saturday morning around 03:30 was the first attempt at first light with the new setup… and one the very first slew, what with new equipment, new mounts, new cables… a cable caught, stopped the mount cold and thank goodness for clutches!

it was late.. the stars had gone already, so no realignment. I told the mount to park.. and of course it parked 30-40 degrees offtarget. I had thought it would know where that is from the encoders.. guess not. slipped the clutch, pointed it roughly north, at least so the building would clear when rolling on and shut down.

Saturday evening was the next chance .. 22:30 was finally dark enough to see some stars to do an alignment. It picked Arcturus… in the south! I only ever remember Arcturus in the east or west.. never south! I used the telrad to find it.. it was 30-50 degrees away. Drove it there with the hand controller until centered in the telrad 1/2 degree circle.

It was in the findercamera FOV. Used the virtual handcontroller to get Arcturus in the center of the prime camera. The next star was Vega. Did the same for that. Successful align! I remember to do only 2 star rather than 3 star… 2 star seems more reliable to be sure.

Parked the scope, powered down, powered up, goto the moon. It went to the moon!

Yay! The mosquitos were swarming saturday night so I did 23 quick 15 second runs on the moon, trying to get all of it to make a mosaic. The camera was not at 90 degrees to the terminator, so getting a grid was difficult. I thought I had it.

This morning I ran all 23 through Autostakkert and went outside to do yardwork.

After that was completed using the best 25% of the frames, I discovered the method to do batch processing of wavelets in Registax. And it worked! That saved a *lot* of mouse clicks and time. Again. Set it to run, go away and come back in an hour and they are done.

The last step was to put these 23 frames into MS Image Composite Editor and away it went. This is the result (reduced in pixels from 10kx10k to 1024×768)

As you can see, I missed one grid portion 🙁 so sad!

Two other sections have green artefacts and two sections you can see the borders.

unsure why that happened but as always… practice practice practice!

Oh well. More cable management with velcro and things are coming together.