Tuesday diary: More trials and tribulations.

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Tuesday.  After spending the entire day [yesterday] in the dome working on the mounting and telescope there was a brief clearing after dark. Mars was rising towards the meridian so I had a quick peek. Fuzzy and colourful! The 7" optics were badly misaligned. It soon clouded over again. Putting an end to my misery. Still no AWR-ASCOM Gotos from Stellarium/Scope. Goto slews on Cartes-Du-Ciel stopped working after a while producing only a beep. It thinks the telescope is pointing below the horizon. The Dec drive is reversed and causing confusion. I tried changing Dir in AWR Factory menu but Dec reversal had no effect. I'll have to read the instructions again.

This [Tuesday] morning the sky was beautifully clear and a slender crescent moon was sharing its space to the SE with a brilliant crescent Venus. After having a quick look at an almost impossibly fuzzy moon I resorted to my extended hex wrench to re-align the 7" objective. The cell's collimation screws are buried deep inside the stumpy dewshield. I needed a torch just to see them. There followed half an hour of to-ing and fro-ing from one end of the telescope to the other. 

Shining my torch into one orifice after another, I danced around the pier trying to avoid the junk on the floor from days of mechanical and electrical work and the debris lefty over from the lifting gear. I had to pull each end of the telescope down in turn  just to reach my target. It was impossible to get my head behind the open focuser so I had to resort to a 2" star diagonal. 

I would shine the torch into the eyepiece receptacle to see three tiny reflections from the surfaces of the objective lens. Nothing I tried with the cell's push pull screws made much sense. Eventually the reflection were nearer each other and nearer the center. But only by sheer luck. Repeating a precious change did not improve the original movement of the reflections. So I sneaked a peak at a now badly bleached moon as the sky brightened rapidly. My fiddling with the collimation screws had improved the image but there was still much more to do.    

I need to get more more organized and write down a [long] list of things to do and prioritize my time on improvements:

Collimate the 7" objective and focuser.

Fix the backlash in the adjustment of both worms. I still haven't fitted any screw adjustment and it shows badly on both axes. If I press too hard on the housing when tightening the bolts the motors complain.

Fix a spring latch on the main door to stop it blowing open all the time and making a vertical wind tunnel.

Fix bolts on the shutter doors to stop them blowing open and closed every few minutes. 

Align the 9x50 finder on a much taller stem. Half the field of view is filled with the big dewshield!

Fit some [gun type] sights on the 7" for rapid alignment on an object. 

Improve the white lighting for when I'm working on the instrument in the dark. Or with the shutter doors closed because of rain. 

That lot hardly scratches the surface of things still to do.

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I fixed the finder and re-aligned it with the 7" on a distinctive tree top at 500 yards. Then I collimated the 7" objective and checked it with the Cheshire. The focuser needed some tweaking too. I cleared the floor into tubs and boxes ready to clear it all away in daylight tomorrow.

Tried a number of combinations of EPs, spacers and the binoviewer in H-alpha on the 6". A  nice prominence and a bit of surface texture but no desirable "blemishes" from my swift scan. The blinding sun was scraping along the ridge of the house even from my raised vantage point.

Mars put in an appearance as the sky darkened. Just in time for a string of dark clouds to get in the way. Grr. I'll try again later. And did. The whole sky was now misty and indistinct.

The finder made homing in on Mars much easier this time. Then Mars repeatedly hid behind thin clouds. At full brightness and higher powers it showed an astigmatic colour wash in and out of focus. Red one side and dirty magenta the other. My collimation obviously isn't good enough yet. Given up and come back in for dinner.

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