Friday 16th November 2007

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I’ve just had the DEC assembly off the EQ-6 following instructions on James Robert Cook’s site. This is where I found the instructions for the RA axis when I regreased that so I was happy to return here for help.

I packed the tapered bearing with grease and regreased the worm. Putting everything back together had me concerned when the bearing near the head of the mount refused to go back into its seat. I eventually tapped it home, very gently, with a small hammer and a rag. My concern was that the casting would crack but I couldn’t see why the bearing would come out so easily then fail to go back in. I know you need to have everything square as it’s a tight fit but like I say, a bit of a scary moment there.

All fitted back together nicely and adjusted the mesh with the power on so that I could make sure everything turned. Adjusting the mesh control grub screws allowed me to take the slack out of the axis and now I’m ready for the next clear night.

After adjusting the RA axis I had a few re-adjustment sessions before I was happy with the mesh, I think I learned from that but I’m still prepared for some fine tuning with the mount under load. A wise man would tell you to take the electronics out, remove the stepper motors and test the mesh with your finger but I like to familliarize myself with the mount a little at a time and had no intention of stripping the whole thing down.

Start to finish was no more than 1 hour, but I didn’t chemically degreased the gears or remove the smaller bearings, I was only interested in making sure there was little or no play in the axis, others will go further and suggest replacing the bearings, but I’m hoping that’s not required at the moment.

Job Done

Thursday 15th November 2007

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Holmes 17PM42The sky cleared and the temperature dropped last night which gave me a few hours of viewing. I picked up Holmes 17P which is fading as the coma expands and got a few random shots while I waited for the rest of the eastern sky to move upwards into my field of view. I got some cluster shots before noticing Orion had slipped into the gap between my house and my neighbour which gave me a chance to image M42 in colour for the first time.

Tonight is clear again and I’m sooo glad I’ve got remote control working, it must be -4 centigrade out there and it’s been +14 all day. That takes some getting used to!

I left the camera while I completed a DVD quiz with the family and found nearly 500 frames of holmes when I finally got back to it. The result is interesting in that I think it shows some erratic movement in my mount, surely all the stars should show the same arc when I stack using the comet core as my target? Instead I have strange curves, take a look:Holmes 17P

There not a lot of post processing gone into this, very little, so it’s a little rough around the edges.

I’m currently pointing the scope in the direction of the Perseus A galaxy which has several faint neighbours all within the SPC900NC’s tiny field of view.

I’ll come back to this post when I have more images, unless I freeze to the finder the next time I go out to realign everything.

M1
I’ve just done a quick processing of this M1, my best yet but still room for improvement. The mount just won’t track for long periods I think it’s time I had the DEC axis apart for a regrease as well, or maybe I should leave it intact and adjust the grub screws, anyway that’s for another time. Here’s M1 taken from a stack of 28x40sec frames.

M42And another M42, this one is is taken from a stack of 200×2.5sec frames. When I get some time I’ll reprocess this with selective frames, but for now it’s just a rough draft.

There are more but I won’t have time to process them tonight so I’ll leave them for another day.