Some minor adjustments.

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With cloudy weather over a couple of days I spent some time rearranging my bare, LED light bulbs, up inside the top of the dome.  A few random slews had found the bulbs directly in the path of the 7" objective as it passed high overhead. You can never predict the route taken by a telescope during a Goto slew. Interestingly, the mounting will often run both axes together until one axis travel is complete. Then the rest of the slew is all done entirely on one motor until it reaches the intended target.

A general view of the mounting, telescopes and eastern observatory. Next time I build a dome and mounting I must remember to put the crossings of the axes in the middle of the observatory.

The final moments of the slew often sees both motors turn for a few brief moments to bring the target to the center of the field of view. All very clever and quite unexpected until I saw it with my own eyes. It always comes as a shock that the three bulky telescopes can miss the mounting and the huge pier without my having deliberately set any limits.This may be true of Goto slews but is not true of manual slews. The telescopes will quite happily try to pass right through the solid, wooden pier.

For this reason it is vitally important not to leave the drives running when I leave the observatory. If I did not return in time, to avoid a slow motion collision, it would not know when to stop. When a telescope is physically blocked from moving it makes a racket through the stalled, stepper motors.

I still haven't discovered why I keep getting "Exceeds Perimeter" notices on the little AWR IH2 'paddle' screen. Particularly when I am re-setting the starting position at the beginning of every, single session. It can never remember the parking [Home] position after a switch off.

I have the Horizon set at '0'  [default] and could not set it any lower. Trying to input sub-horizontal angles for Horizon [like -1° or 2°] produces crazy numbers like 259°.  359 I could understand, but why 259?

I gave the rough plastic, motor clamping plates a quick polish on the cloth, buffing wheel. The whole assembly is almost invisible once in place on the big FT focuser but every little helps. I should have the new 14T timing pulley and belt in tomorrow's post.

I really ought to go into the AWR Factory settings to check all the initial parameters have not been changed. It could have happened by my clumsy button pressing since the installation. I think I had to change the Max Dec setting to stop the mounting routinely going completely the wrong way via North under the Pole. I could not possibly let that happen with such long OTAs and a hefty Dec drive cable. The telescopes kept trying to swipe my laptop off the shelf on the north side of the pier.

It is still terrifying to see the scopes head the wrong way at the beginning of a Meridian Flip. Though always driven manually on both axis buttons. I still can't get AWR to do a FLIP on command via the IH2. Nor to do so automatically on reaching the Meridian or just past. "Perimeter Exceeded" again, regardless of the original OTA positions. I have already discussed how I had to manually change LST, by two hours, just to get AWR/ CduC to slew accurately around the sky between chosen objects.

Click on any image for an enlargement.

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