25th April 2019 Solar & Goto.

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An odd start with the telescope 'target' overlaid on the eastern horizon in C-Du-C. To match the supposed parking place in AWR. Hopefully a positive sign.

First attempt to slew to the sun resulted in a slew to the north east! The sun was high in the south east! Crap! So I had to abandon the slew and manually drive the telescope via the paddle after sending it almost Home to the parking position to save time.

I then went into the AWR Factory Menu [Info> Reboot+M] and changed Max-Dec to 88 degrees. This is supposed to stop the mounting trying to go the long way around over the pole.  

Once centred on the sun there was nothing visible on the disk in WL. In H-a I could see nothing either. Not even a prom when Gong Ha showed lots all along the eastern limb. Later examination via the ZWO showed them well and I captured a couple of videos.

Before a break for lunch I was trying to focus on fine surface detail in white light with the ZWO camera. The area of detail is highly dependent on how much of the solar disk appears in the field of view. A brightness or contrast effect.

The DC motor focusing works well enough but I have substituted the stiff O-ring with rubber bands. Ideally I need a much thinner and weaker O-ring of about the same diameter Which could [hopefully] slip on the motor pulley when I need to manually coarse focus by means of the adjustment knobs. The focuser needs only a little torque on the fine focus knob to turn reliably.

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