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Start Alignment of MX

Finally, some clear sky!

Bad news – suddenly the SBig won’t connect. Updated drivers, played with it awhile – doesn’t seem to be picking up the drivers when powered up, although it does do the filter wheel spin. Will have to call support tomorrow:(

Ran several iterations of TPoint. using the Edge and the Xsi.Got better at positioning. However, some  of it I did wrong – I didn’t understand I should be doing a Full run rather than a Recalibration.

On the good side, running AAG worked like a dream. It plate solves routinely with 20 sec exposures.  So, I ran a couple of 50 point runs. I am getting RMS errors of about 120 arcseconds. The Azimuth now looks good (no correction recommended). I will do another run to see how the Alt is – I moved it 4 Arcseconds. If that looks good, I will need? to do one of these big runs people seem to report, like 300 points.

Interesting – I ran the Supermodel on the last 50 point run, and it suddenly reports 7.7 arcseconds of error? Apparently the basic model doesn’t do all the fancy stuff to correct the position. Also, the manual makes a big deal out of the time it takes to calculate the Supermodel – it only took 11 seconds for my 50 points. Maybe when I do a Big model (300 points?) it will take a lot longer. I will have to check and see whether it really points this well.

Tpoint51.jpg
Supermodel for my 50 points corrected from 120 arcs to 7.7 arcs!

I also did some Vcurve runs. The Xsi clearly needs different parameters for FocusMax; the target HFDs seem to be 10-15 instead of the usual 3-5 I get with the SBig. Also, when doing the focus exposures (1 or 2 seconds) the HFD fluctuates quite a bit (+/- 4 or 5 HFD units). Hopefully the focusing will work OK. Also: the focusing is doing the cycle of make the focus box too small, expand focus box, get a point, make it too small again.  I may have to keep playing with these parameters to get consistent focus.

Next ToDo:

– Another 50 point run to check alignment.

– If OK, Big Model with 300 points.

– Start programming PEC.

– Learn about ProTrack. Try some 2 and 5 minute exposures, see how they do without guiding. See how ProTrack helps (or not?).

Things to do during daylight:

– figure Atl/Az for the roof and trees to the west. Now that things are aligned OK, I can do this.

– paint over the dew zapper LEDs – they are very bright.

– Call SBig and see if they can help with the camera, or whether I need to send it in.

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