Motor turning!

More arduino fun!

Post observing report 12/23/2014

Hi all,

I thought last night was a lost night. First I forgot all of the manuals for my equipment at home, then it seemed that the telescope would not point, ever. Here is a summary of what I learned. 

Balance is crucial

The mount would not pont properly due to a wild imbalance in the declination axis, this resulted from balancing the tube with the camera attached but without the finder attached. The resulting imbalance caused the telescope to swing wildly when slewing in the declination direction. 

Need more power, Captain!

The night ended as a result of the Canon SL1 loosing power, this was after I had spent two hours charging it to make sure it was fully charged. The obvious solution is to power the Canon from the 12v SLA AGM battery which is not at all discharged even after running both the telescope and laptop from the begining of the night to when we packed it in. 

The best eyepiece is a Canon Camera

I cannot over emphasise how impressed with the Back Yard EOS software I am. I was able to get closer to good polar alignment than I ever have before using the camera to drift align the telescope. The thing is that now even if I wanted to do something with another imager, I think I would use the cannon first to align everything. 

As I have said in the past, many times, murphy's law goes double in Astronomy. At various times, the software for pointing the telescope, EQMOD, would not take input from a gamepad, or would claim to be pointing the wrong direction, these issues in and of themselves were not fatal, and that is progress. 

The final piece of good news from the night was that we were able to catch decent images of Albireo, and while there is significant coma at the edge of the field the images of the double star itself are still impressive. But the best image of the lot is one with a meteor in it:

Finally I have revamped the astrophotography page for the blog.

The interminable list of things to do.

Hi All,

Now that the semester is nearly over, I have a couple of announcements. First, I am not going to be returning to my Mathematics PhD program at ASU. For all of my friends still working toward their piled higher and deeper degree, I wish you the best of luck, and who knows I may drop by from time to time when I am tutoring on campus.

Now that that announcement is out of the way. I am currently working on a project with my little (read: younger) brother which may or may not result in more money coming my way. In any case, I am now as busy as I have ever been working on various projects.

OpenAIP is still alive and well though the code is still in rough shape, it probably still compiles though their is a lot of learning I need to do before I return too it. Unfortunately, my coding time has been hijacked by the project with my brother.

The telescope is still in boxes, for the most part I have not had time during the busy semester to use it and now that my time is clearing up the weather is not cooperating. I am still looking to get the equipment together I need to go camping, which should happen some time early next year.

I am still hoping to work on a focuser for my telescope, using my Arduino. I don't think I posted the videos from dipping my toes into Arduino programming so here they are:

Hopefully over the break I will be getting some more pieces, specifically a stepper motor, a driver and some optoisolators. If I can get that working I will post it. Also I have decided to start a Go Fund Me page because I am shameless and all of my projects seem to be out of my price range.