After consulting the weather forecast yesterday I didn’t expect to have any opportunity to get out this weekend, but after a sleep early evening I popped outside and was pleasantly surprised to find a, mostly, clear sky. I was less pleased, but not so surprised, to find how cold it was. It wasn’t a thrilling 90 minutes observing. I still have what I consider a somewhat uninteresting patch of sky available, in all likelihood this is a function of the limits of my knowledge, and everything was set up in some haste. But it was still interesting as it flagged up a couple of things that I need to look into, one relating to the ‘scope/laptop/software and the other regarding just exactly what I’m looking at!
Got everything set up, ‘scope, laptop, cable et al. I fire up the NexRemote software and select the ‘Night Vision’ option which darkens the representation of the handset but the background is still normal, will have to create an all black .jpg to use as a background when using the laptop. Started to do the alignment process and started to find the first area of my ignorance. Didn’t take long to realise that it’s a little problematical to do the alignment from the laptop, using the touchpad to manoeuvre the telescope around to line up the stars to be used for the alignment is not too clever, back and forth between the finder, the eyepiece and using the touchpad to manipulate the keys on the representation of the handset requires either more hands, more eyes or more of both than I have! So I tried the align with both the handset, which remains active, and the laptop and the alignment failed. Went through the laborious process using only the laptop and it was successful. On each occasion I used the three stars of the summer triangle and was precise as I could be in centring each one and this made me wonder about the setup between the NexRemote, handset and the mount. Does NexRemote register position changes initiated via the handset? It must do, mustn’t it, it must interrogate the mount for the current motor position each time it starts to move to a new object? In which case it shouldn’t affect the alignment no matter where the motor commands came from. But I was scrupulous it doing the first alignment and it failed. This uncertainty will be resolved with use I imagine.
The other question raised tonight was about just what it was I was seeing through the eyepiece. After getting the SLT to go to a few objects I had it go back to Vega to check the accuracy of the alignment, it was a little off, putting Vega below and to the right of centre in the field of view, but not wildly out of alignment. Having suggested I don’t have the most interesting piece of sky available to me at this time of year, there are a number of Messier objects available and I decided to have a look at a few. Having established that the alignment was OK I have to assume that it was putting the requested object in the field, yet I didn’t recognise anything that looked noteworthy. After the battery on the laptop was down to under 20% and I had packed things up for the night I checked Starry Night for the objects I’d been looking for/at and most of them were globular clusters and I now need to try to find out if the 25mm eyepiece, actual FOV 1.30⁰, magnification 78x, either doesn’t resolve what I was looking at or the FOV is too tight? One way or another it keeps me occupied!
