Update for season 2014-2015

There has been quiet times in the BBubble observatory... So here's a short review of what has happened!


Let's go back to August! Darkness was arriving after the Summer and I put everything ready; focuser, camera, mount control box and so on. Powered everyhting up and suddenly the mount started to move in RA-axis faster than it has ever done before (because of the 1,5m scope I've limited the slew speed to 5 deg/sec)... WTF!!!!!!! Ok, power off to prevent any damages. Checked the cabling and tried again with the same result, great.....


Contacted the mount's manufacturer who wanted me to sent the mount so he can fix it. We agreed that I would try to find the failed part because it would be much easier to send and fix that than the whole mount. After dozens of emails and measurements with oscilloscope we find the broken RA-axis encoder. Another part which "has never failed before"...


Manufacturer promised to send me a new one after he gets it. After a week he mailed that the one he got has a broken cover. So we agreed that I'll send mine and he switches that cover to the broken one. And finally after 1,5 months I got my Mesu2 working again. And then the clouds came...


Ok, normal Finnish winter. More than 2 months of cloudiness. Finally some clear skies in December so I could make another polar alignment to my mount (I accidently moved the mount during repair). Done!!


Then collimation and check the straighness of the optical path, Done with less than 1" error. And then more clouds...


Few days later I wondered that my computer in the observatory was offline. The hard disc drive has failed... Ok, easy to change and lost only 30hrs of calibration data. But needed to install every driver again.


In the middle of Janury few moments of clear skies again. Vcurves for the Focusmax and adjusting autoguider settings in the MaximDL.


Next night perfect weather with 0% moon. Started all remotely to and watched how CCDCommander begun its script. Everything connected, dome slaved, mount slewed to focus star, plate solve and recenter and then focus run. Started ok but then reported that on the "wrong side of V-curve"... Focuser reported to be near Home-position when I stopped the script. Moved focuser back to starting position and took a few second image. WTF!!!


There was only donuts in the screen, no stars... Great!! Later that night I drove to the observatory an found my PDF focuser jammed to its outmost position. Closed everything and went to sleep.


So now I'm waiting istructions from the FLI how to repair the PDF. There's propably only a loose screw in the motor drive sprocket but the focuser needs to be opened to tighten it.

14" Newtonian

This was about a year long project from first orders to first light!

So here's my "home build" 14" Newtonian inside the observatory. There's not too much extra room but it fits in perfectly.

This is combination of parts from several manufacturer's and a home made carbon fiber tube.

Here's some specifications:
Primary mirror:                  Oldham Optical, 14" (355mm) with PV 1/10λ and strehl 0.97
Secondary mirror:              Oldham Optical, 4.7" (120mm) 
Focal ratio:                        f/4.8 (focal length 1700mm)
Primary mirror cell:            Orion Optics U.K
Secondary spider:               Protostar, 4-vane heavy-duty with anti-dew heater
Focuser:                            Orion Optics U.K, 3" Crayford with 10:1 reduction (+RoboFocus)
Field corrector:                  Orion Optics U.K, 3" CFF (corrected field flattener)
Tube inside diameter:         400mm
Tube length:                       about 1600mm
Weight:                             about 30kg (without camera)

And here's a detailed picture of the camera. As you can see I didn't pay too much of attention for finalizing the tube. And I needed to add a steel plate (~3kg) under the Robofocus to balance it better (to fit it inside the observatory). The adhesive tape is used only for blocking the possible scattered light. Sbig RGH (remote guide head) is used for guiding.

Adjusting and some test photos

About a week ago was a clear night but both the seeing and transparency weren't that good, about 4 and 3. There were again some haze and ice crystals and the average FWHD was about 3.5.

Everything is working again and I spend about an hour to finalize my collimation. I got it pretty good, but I think I'll try to get it a little better... Less than 2" would be perfect. (Don't mind about huge gradients in the backgroud...)

And here's crop of two hours (12*600sec) exposure of NGC2805.

Due the bad conditions there's not so much of details. But I'm surprised how deep the image is!!
Here's some galaxies pointed out with Aladin sky atlas and NED (NASA/IPAC extragalactic database).

Maintenance break

So, after few emails to Australia and some testing the Argonavis controller have to be sent back to factory for repair. And this means several weeks delay for this season.

I have to say that I'm quite pissed but no can do! This happens with electronics every now and then.

Update

Still waiting for the mount... It's few weeks late now and the manufacturer is expecting some more delay. Hopefully not for too long!

Updating equipment

I planned to update my mount (EQ-6 SynTrek) to better one  for this season. I have been quite satisfied with it but I wanted more accurate one.

I had saved enough to buy one I had in mind. But the same day I was placing an order for that I found another manufacturer's mount with good accuracy and payload and the most important thing, about half the price! So suddenly I had few "extra" Euros to spend...

So today UPS brought me big and heavy Pelican case from U.K (thanks Brian). Inside was HUGE filter wheel (FW8-STL) with eight 50mm filters (Baader's LRGB+HaOiiiSiiHb) and remote quide head.

Behind the wheel is SBIG's STL-11000XM with class0 chip. Camera has large (36mm*24,7mm) chip with 11Mpix (4008*2672).

And now I have to wait about a month for a dark night... First one with astronomical darkness will be 24th of August.

SkyWatcher ED80 Pro

I just noticed that there's no proper picture of my imaging setups. So here's the one with smaller scope:

From left: QHY9, QHY filter wheel with Astronomik's HaLRGB filters, TS 9mm OAG with Atk314e, WO 0.8 reducer and finally the ED 80Pro with Robofocus. The mount is EQ-6 SynTrek.

Electrical and communication box

I finished this few weeks ago and I kinda forgot it. Plan was to make a DIY -type box which encases every "sensitive" parts of the observatory. I decided to isolate that to make sure that temperature inside the box would remain above 0°C. I didn't put there any heater because I thought that two electrical inverters (220V to 12V) would do the trick. I made it quite wide to ensure that everything would have enough room, so the final size was 50:50:40cm.

Lower part includes electronic equipment. Bigger inverter (silver one) is Meanwell's and provides 12V and 150W which actually is more than enough for my equipment (I calculated about 9A), but I had older 5A inverter which I put also inside to feed power to dew-heater. There is also two transformers which provides 5V to Icron's 4-port USB Ranger and an active USB-hub.

And in the upper part is mainly "communications". From the left: USB Ranger, QHY9 power supply (front), wireless gamepad's receiver (black lying above wires), 2-port USB to RS-232 (just right of QHY) and the USB hub.

There's a lot of wires going to the walls behind and beside the USB-hub. They are part of 12V system which I made. I wanted to put most valuable things behind a separate fuses, and the cheapest and easiest way was to use a electrical box of a boat (cost about 20€). That also allows me to use everything separately by selecting equipment which will be powered. This was very useful when I had that motor problem in the mount. I could disable the power input to the mount just by using switch.

There are fuses and power switches to the mount, to both cameras and to QHY's filter wheel (which relays the power to RoboFocus).

And the isolation of the box works perfectly! Picture is taken with phone so it's really awful... But the temperature inside is +5.3°C even though there was almost -25 outside.

My observatory: Third step, polar alignment

I made rough polar alignment with mounts own polar alignment scope. Then I used a free software called "pole align max" or PAM. It sure made things easy!

Basically the computer moves the scope and takes pictures and then tells you where to turn the mount. After 3 runs my polar alignment error was less than 2 arcsec.

Here's my whole setup doing polar alignment. Main camera is QHY9 with QHY's color filter wheel and Astronomik's filters (LRGBHa). I use my old Atik314e as a guider.

My observatory: Second step, structure

The walls came up quite fast because they were made of big plates of plywood. The roof also was easier to built than I thought it would be... The hardest thing was probably to lift it up.

Moving parts of the roof are from sliding doors. Both sides over the wall are u-type metal bars and under the roof are the rollers. The roof can be opened by one hand.

Here is my mount (EQ-6 SynTrek) with my bigger scope, 8" SCT.

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My observatory: First step, base of the mount

I started to plan fixed observing site last winter because I got tired of carrying things outside and back in. It happened more than ten times that I carry everything to my backyard and built them up and then when it was time to put power on the clouds came in and covered the sky. And the next thing to do was carry everything back in to the storage.

I started to plan this "observatory" at summer and soon decided to make it with roll-off roof. I also wanted to keep up the possibility to remove it during summer times. So the only permanent structure was going to be the base of the mount.

And finally at the end of September I started this project. Here is the base of the mount! 1 meter long tube with 55cm diameter dug in the ground and filled with concrete. (upper steel plate is there just to keep those 18mm metal bars straight...)