This is first light from my Officina Stellare RiDK 400 deployed at Obstech in Chile.   It has been a fun and relatively seamless experience getting this gear up and running thanks to the support team at Obstech which has been very helpful and responsive. 

The weather in Chile has been super challenging since I went live at the end of July.  At least 50% of the nights have been cloudy.  When it has been clear, seeing has been quite poor averaging just over 2 arc seconds.  For that reason I chose the Dragons of Ara as my first image with the rig using my FSQ106 that is piggybacked on top of the RiDK.   Meanwhile I patiently collected data on NGC300 for nearly a month whenever I found that magic window of clear sky, no moon and sub 2 seeing.  I was finally able to cobble together enough data to make a decent image.

Another challenge for me personally was figuring out the art of capturing sky flats.  I am so accustomed to the ease of LED panels.  It took forever to find the right conditions and also to be available and at the computer to start grabbing frames the moment the roof opens and before stars begin to appear in the images.  I know there are automated ways to do this, but that is a future project.  I was able to capture a decent batch just this week, and I was pretty surprised at how well they worked actually.

I am looking forward to the clear and stable Chilean summer skies and the steady stream of data that my three active scopes will produce.  Between these two scopes at Obstech and my TOA150 at SRO in California, there were a few nights over the last month where all three were collecting data at the same time!  While the TOA is pretty automatic at this point, these two still have plenty of gremlins to work out and it is still a long night of monitoring and tinkering.  

NGC300 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor.  It is one of the closest galaxies to our local group.  it is roughly 94,000 light years in diameter which is somewhat smaller than the Milky Way.  Apparently it shares a lot of characteristics with the very popular Triangulum Galaxy.

Here are a couple images of the system during the installation.

CS