Day 113 Sunday 13th July 2014 T-Point Model, Galaxies in Lyra, M81,M82,M63 and Pluto.

Sunday

Jul132014

Sunday, July 13, 2014 at 8:36AM

Another hot clear day - will the clouds roll in tonight? It will be a bright Moon tonight.

I thought I would do some balancing experiments today to show how easily the telescope can be imbalanced - and hopefully how well it can be balanced.

I start off with a video of the effect of putting the corrector plate cover on the telescope with the RA axis unclamped and loose. Will it move when I add the cover?

Obviously the telescope is not quite balanced otherwise it would not move when I removed the cap.

A little more tweaking

Not perfect but pretty close!

No clouds but hard to see many stars with the very bright Moon. The seeing seemed pretty poor but nevertheless allowed me to map over 40 stars and carry out a Lyra galaxy imaging run. It seemed very humid and the images were mottled in some cases particularly when the temperature was reduced to 5 C or less. At ambient temperature of high 20's C a lot of heat generated dots - which were removed by dark frames but I tried to get a balance between the temperature and thermal "stars". I think it likely that I need to bake the camera dessicant plug in the oven again to improve its moisture capturing capability in the camera. The best compromise seemed at about 15 C. Bear in mind daytime temperatures go up to 35 degrees C here most days.

After the T-Point Model was established the following polar alignment adjustments were recommended

I think I will repeat the process to get another T Point model before making adjustments to the mount as I used stars on both sides of the meridian. T Point recommends only using a model built up on one side of the meridian for reliable polar alignment data.

I did a galaxy run of 39 Lyra galaxies to be able to use Grepnova with the previous run on the same galaxies a few weeks back. The images were all of poor quality.

PGC 62838