I have added a couple of new pieces of equipment:
Camera: QSI683wsg. Got this used from OPT. It has the OAG and 7 filters (LRGB and 3nm HAlpha, OIII, and SII). It does have a column defect, so I need to handle this in PixInsight. To do this I have to turn off the ACP option to flip images when looking west. Will need to do the flip in CalibLight.js when calibrating the images.
Camera: QHY 5-III 290M. Used from Cloudy Nights. This will serve as the guider on the Edge / STF8300, I think. The St-i is running on the FSQ / QSI683. This is the camera used by Christopher Go for his amazing planetary images.
Rotator: Optec 3″ Pyxis Rotator (Gen 1). Used from Cloudy Nights, from Ron? Desantis in Tucson. This is a typical Optec beast. The 3″ aperture should avoid vignetting and be useful far into the future if I move to bigger cameras. I tested it out, and a couple of issues showed up immediately.
- It turns very slowly. At first I thought it wasn’t working because I couldn’t see anything moving. Taking the face plate off showed it was actually working just fine, thank you very much.
- When the unit is powered on, it takes 6 minutes to go through power up / self test. Once operational I will not want to ever turn it off. When the observatory shuts down I will leave it powered on.
- I probably need to fabricate a replacement RS232 cable going from USB port to the unit. The existing cable is too short to run all the way from the Electronics cabinet to the rotator. Looks like 6 conductor reversed, with two different modjack connectors (one is smaller than the other).
- The previous owner did not provide any adaptors, so I have to order some.
Adaptors I think I need, with spacing calculation:
Replacement Lights. The existing Rope LED light has never been very good. It is too dim, especially for doing maintenance work in the dome. I plan to replace the rope with several bright light units (hopefully 100W equivalent) strung from an extension cord with multiple plugs. This will allow the wall switch to still turn the lights on.