The Hyperstar III is go again :)

We had an extremely rare clear and Moonless night last night – the stars were superb.  Hard decision time – what do I do?  Do I spend a great viewing evening on getting the Hyperstar III back up and running, or do I continue working on the mini-WASP array?  Decided I would get the Hyperstar going again as that will allow me to get some imaging done with the Hyperstar while I continue commissioning the mini-WASP.  So – first start was to get the mount polar aligned after “tankifying” the Celestron “Heavy Duty” wedge.  This took the best part of 2 and a half hours – so we’re now at 11:30 p.m. with a reasonable polar alignment and virtually nothing else done.  Next on the list – fire up the Robofocus and train the focuser with a few V-curves.  Got good consistency in the curves after about an hour – so now we’re at 12:30 a.m.  Next, need to collimate the Hyperstar, this is always a pain.  You need to make the collimation adjustment, refocus, take an image, analyse the image in CCDInspector and then adjust again.  A tortuous time-consuming job – but actually got reasonable collimation in around an hour.  So now we’re at 1:30 a.m. what to do next?  As the sky is still great so I might as well image something – closest object to where I was working is the Heart nebula – that’ll do.  Got 4 x 15-minute subs (with dithering!) on the Heart and went to bed.  Just checked the data this morning – very nice.  Collimation can probably do with an extra little tweak but not bad overall – at least I have one system back up and running again ready for the winter  goodies 🙂