Darker nights and a few clear skies have appeared again. So I finally have some opportunities to see how well the summer’s development work has succeeded. Compare the very first photo I captured a year ago using the 1st version of the telescope with the latest V2 mechanism last night.
The original has a slight smudge where the Andromeda Galaxy should be, lots of raw signal noise and some out of focus stars. At the time I was delighted because at least I’d FOUND the right part of the sky and managed to capture a couple of stars.
Last night’s image is starting to look more promising…
I’m happier with this 2nd image, its showing some progress, although I think it can be improved further.
As usual, every observation session uncovers new issues, and provides more ideas for improvement. This week’s list is to look at making the altitude movement smoother (there’s some slippage at a certain angle), and to debug the image tracking (I think I’ve introduced some glitches during the summer’s development work).
Short Bus Blog 