Getting this picture was quite the adventure. Mid project I had set up my telescope to get another night of lights for the Wizard Nebula in the early evening and I went out for dinner with family. Well, while I was out an Astronomers worst nightmare happened. A freak thundershower came through Burlington while I was out, even though all 4 apps I use to check weather before set up didn't indicate a thing. My telescope, guide scope, cameras, and mount got completely soaked as I didn't have it covered. Luckily, I didn't have any electricity connected but a little bit of water got inside the tube of my C8.

I spent the past few weeks drying everything out and set up my AVX mount (manually, no power), and C8 tube inside so I could remove the corrector plate to clean it inside and out to remove the water spots, plus wipe the inside of the tube from the little bit of water that got in there. Again, I was lucky the primary and secondary mirrors were fine, no damage there. Phew!

When I finished cleaning the corrector and re-attached it, I disengaged the knobs on the RA/DEC axis to move the mount back to the original position (I had the tube pointing up so when I removed the corrector it wouldn't fall out). As I moved the DEC axis it got stiff all of the sudden, then the sound of grinding just before it completely seized on me. Would not budge after that.

I was out of commission for a couple of weeks as I learned to disassemble my DEC axis on my AVX to discover that the collar on the counterweight bar binded with the housing and caused the shaft to gall and seize with the housing. I had to pound out the shaft with a mallet, sand everything down on the shaft and the housing to remove the galling, grease it all back up, and then reassemble and keep my fingers crossed on my skills as it was my first attempt to work on a mount. Not to mention collimating the C8.

Tracking has been 0.7 to 1.2 depending on seeing etc, which is where I left off before the incident. I'm so happy to be back and okay for now, as it was very scary there for a while for me. I don't have any other mounts and I'm not currently in the position to buy another mount.

You could say a lot of blood and sweat went into this image, as it literally did for me

Clear Skies

P.S. I do have a serious problem with my stars becoming triangular when using BlurXTerminator. I tried various attempts to fix and make the stars more round but nothing worked. They were a bit elongated to start with so I'm looking at back focus or tilt, to see if I can do anything about it, it's a work in progress. I had it before this incident, but it really became apparent in this one so I included the starless image on hover. Of course, any ideas or suggestions are welcome.