New Forest Observatory ®

Here is a view inside the dome on this sunny Sunday 🙂  The cables are all attached (both ends) and virtually every socket of the two Belkin extension leads is taken up.  Now need a clear night for Polar Alignment – the LR44 batteries have arrived for the illuminated reticle.  Bought from Amazon.co.uk I paid the princely sum of £1.99 for ten (yes that’s 10) LR44 batteries – WITH FREE POSTAGE.  How can they possibly do that?  Don’t know, don’t care – what I do know is I’ve paid that amount for one battery in a store 🙁

So – we are rapidly approaching “First Light” for the mini-WASP array.  Cameras and filter-wheels have been fired up and checked – it’s all systems go.  Tom How has built half of the dome rotator unit (we will have two stepper motors to not only have redundancy but also to reduce the load per motor) – it looks VERY beefy and capable.

Complete robotic observatory is on the cards now, rain sensors, dome aperture automation…………….. a never ending list.

Put a Gigabit LAN card in the old white computer (the one on the right in the bay) and fitted an Aluminium bracket loaded with cable ties to take (most of) the cables from the Paramount to the computers, off the floor and above the swinging counterweight arm.

Here is the current state of play with the mini-WASP array project.  Kieron of SCS Astro came to my rescue yet again with a third Paramount counterweight that I desperately needed before firing up the Paramount with the Sky 6.  Thank you for bailing me out yet again Kieron 🙂  As you can see I haven’t bothered with any cable management at present, and that mess of spaghetti doesn’t even include the two cameras with their power supply leads, the autoguider connections, or the filter wheel USB cables – so there’s plenty more to get in there yet.

In the above picture the Paramount is pointing towards Polaris according to the Sky6 – so next clear night the idea is to shift the mount so that the mount’s optical axis is aligned to Polaris, then align all 4 telescopes to Polaris (visually).  Next the cameras and filter wheels go on and the Paramount is re-balanced.  Then I drift align the mount and finally I run a T-Point to get a map and to fine tune the Polar Alignment.  At this stage I will run a periodic error correction program to fine tune the tracking and then finally after all that I might even start taking some images – so there’s plenty of things to do yet before true “First Light”.