Too bad it wasn't baseball!

After peeking at the clear sky chart for my back yard, which also happens to be my favorite observing site, I decided that tonight, I would make a conscious attempt to get and do some observing. 

By roughly 9pm, the moon was visible, and the sky was starting to darken visibly, but still showing it's bluish glow, which is typical of summer evenings.  By 9:45, I was shutting down my game of Final Fantasy, on my NES emulator, and was raring to go.  The sky was dark, though not black, and there were just a few clouds lurking about my 'horizon', which is about 10-15 degrees above the real horizon, due to the trees on my property.  The western sky was still visibly awash in light, but I didn't care.  My target was the moon and Jupiter.  My goal was to image them.

Went outside, uncovered the scope, went to plug in the mount, and realized that my cases were all over my observing deck.  So I ran back to the house, got the collapsible table that we bought a few weeks back, hauled it back to my observing deck and set it up on the grass alongside my observing deck.  Gotta admit, it was a little low to the ground, but to be expected since my deck is easily 9-10 inches above the ground.  But, the table was serving it's purpose.  All my accesory cases fit, including the laptop, and all the bits for the thermacell mosquito repellent.

Finally back on track, I decided to re-align the mount, since I had bumped it and jostled it alot when I was mounting the guidescope.  After an hour screwing around with it, I realized two things.  First, the Dec axis had to be swung 90 degress to let the polar scope 'see'.  Second, it was necessary to remove the polar scope's cover.  Oops.  Regardless, the mount did have to be adjusted, since it was off by about one half degree.

By this point the mount was up and running, but the GPS module was not.  Normally the GPS acquires in about 90 seconds, but tonight, even after 5 minutes it wouldn't acquire it's signal.  So I took it off, and manually set the date, time, DST and Lat/Long.  While this was all happening, I can report that my guide scope has seen first light, and so too has my Starshoot Autoguider.

So now that I had the scope running and the mount slewing, it was time to 3-star align the mount.  Turns out, my scopes weren't aligned to Polar North when I started the 3-star align, so everything was WAY off.  In the end, after another 20 minutes messing around with it, I re-parked the mount, restarted it, and without aligning the mount, told it to slew to Jupiter.  From there, I manually released the Dec and RA clutches and centered Jupiter myself.  While there I got to peek at Jupiter and the Galilean moons.  I wish I had my camera.  it was a nice view.

Anyways by this point, I did some test slews to Vega, Altair and Arcturus, only to find that each star was winking out behind the clouds that were starting to roll in.  I slewed back to Jupiter, got one last view, and packed it in for the night.

A productive night?  I guess that depends.  Did I get any observing done?  Nope.  Did I get any imaging done?  Nope.  Did I get the bugs and kinks worked out of the scope?  Yup. 

1 out of 3 isn't a good exam score, but it's not bad for baseball!

About 2 weeks ago, I put an order with my buddy Scott at the Manitoba Museum for some parts for my rig.  Well they arrived last weekend, but I just hadn't had time to pick them up.  I had the day off yesterday, so I made the trip downtown with my daughter.

All told, I bought four items:

• Small Accessory Case
• Large Accessory Case
• 10x50 Binoculars
• 90mm f/9.1 refractor

The small accessory case is substantially smaller than I expected, and really only serves to house small parts.  I did find that if I removed the foam inserts leaving the slightly padded interior, it worked fabulously for hand controllers (Syntek controller for the Atlas EQ-G and two hand controllers for the focusers).

The large accessory case, on the other hand has more than enough space to hold all of my non-photographic accessories.  There spots for 8 1.25-inch eyepices, 3 2-inch eyepieces, barlows, filter cases, etc...

The 10x50 binoculars are a massive improvement over my existing 12x50s which are not only heavier, but have also seeing their fair share of abuse.

Now the 90mm refractor; that's something else.  This was combined with the parts that arrived a few days ago from ADM accessories, I've got the 90mm refractor, which is going to ultimately serve as my guidescope, piggy-backed onto my 6" f/5 reflector.  To support the completly computerized use of my rig, I promptly installed the AccuFocus Electronic Focuser that I bought last year when it was on sale. 

While I was installing the focuser, and came to the realization that these latest additions to my rig will require the installion of new counterweights, I noted that the threads on the eyepiece adapter of the refractor looked oddly familiar.  I quickly dug into my photographic accessories, which at this point were strewn all over the living room, and desperately tried to find my K10D adapter.  Having difficulty, I decided the recently purchaed Orion Starshoot Autoguider (SSAG) was good enough.

I quickly removed the SSAG's 1.25-inch nosepiece and confirmed it had T-rings.  On a hunch, I spun the SSAG onto the focuser tube of the 90mm refractor and was amazed that it fit.  Not only does this mean that I don't need the nose cone, but by using T-rings along the entire optical train, will surely stiffen the optical train of the refractor hopefully eliminating (or at least substantially minimizing) flexure, which is not a good thing to have in a guiding system, even if I have to use an an extender tube to achieve focus (which seems to be likely).  All told Very Cool!