Clear night last night – didn’t matter there was a blazing Moon up for setting up the Hyperstar III. Managed to get good collimation quite quickly and then went on to re-train the focuser as so much had moved since I last did this I think the parameters were a little bit off. So focuser retrained as well and all seems o.k. Took a few short subs of Sadr to check nothing out of the ordinary – will process those shortly. Also doesn’t seem to be any water vapour now in the CCD cavity (I had to take the M25C apart after the repair and warm everything up with a hair dryer before resealing the CCD). So – hopefully it is now all systems go, ready and waiting for the next Hyperstar target.
Oh yes – there’s something of importance to Hyperstar owners. When it comes to collimating your Hyperstar system, only pay attention to the numbers you get from CCDInspector and don’t worry too much about the central obstruction (the CCD) not being dead centre on an out of focus star in the centre of the CCD. This just means the optical axis of the mirror is not dead centred (this is the case with my C11 anyway) and fortunately there’s enough “play” in the Hyperstar III to deal with this.
