Went to Paul Lind and designed/built a new focuser bracket for the Sky90. This bracket attaches to the Sky90 finder scope position, so now the telescope can be rotated in the bracket. This in turn allows the camera to be positioned so it doesn’t need counterweights.
Took everything apart and rebuilt. Ended up moving the Paramount Versa plate up as far as it would go, then reversing the Homeyer cradle and moving it farther up the Versa plate. After a couple of iterations, managed to get the Edge11 mounted so it is balanced. I have the 4 bolts holding the cradle to the Versa plate all in the front slots of the cradle; the Versa plate doesn’t give access to the back slot. Seems like it holds fine. Connected the E11 wiring and balanced.
Worked on getting the Edge11 rotated so the top dovetail is on the axis. Don’t want the Sky90 leaning to one side:) I can line up bolts centered on the E11 with bolts centered on the cradle to get it correctly aligned. Put a level on the dovetail and it looks good.
Mounted the Sky90 on top, with the wiring. Turns out the weight of the lens caps affects the balance, so I balanced everything without lens caps. This means I need to remove the E11 lens cap even though I am not imaging with it.
Nice – everything balances neutrally without the extra 25 lb weight room counterweight I had been using. I suppose that could also have been an issue since it does not clamp to the bar. I can balance everything without any counterweights on the OTA – nice. I left the maple dovetails on the cradle, but nothing is mounted on them.
First shot at TPoint model shows a better raw scatterplot. Many of the outliers are the first 12 samples which I do manually before letting AAG_TPointMapper do its thing. The overall distribution seems better.
The orthographic shows a scattering of error.
The supermodel, however, seems to again get squeezed North/South. Not sure why that is.
And, I still see the drifting of a star in RA/Dec.
Next step, get the polar alignment better so I can eliminate that from drifting concerns, then redo TPoint.