Title: The TOA Arrives
Description: The TOA OTA was one of the first things that arrived. I ordered it in December 2022 and it came the following March. Then it spent several months on the couch in my office waiting for a camera and a mount.
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Title: Focuser
Description: One of the first things I could do was replace the stock NS focuser with a Moonlite WR35.
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Title: Power
Description: Because I wont' be anywhere near this rig, I had to do something I've never done before: automate every little thing. Lloyd Smith, the owner of DSW, recommended the Digital Loggers Web Pro power strip, which allows control of individual power outlets from anywhere via a web browser. It works great, but it's a little tedious to configure. Having this enables me to turn everything off during the day--or for a stretch of several days if the weather is continuously bad. And configuring my NUC to boot on power-up enables me to start the computer using this switch.
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Title: Software
Description: Next up was loading and setting up all the software on the NUC. I use ASCOM Platform 6.6SP1, NINA, PHD2, the 10Micron Virtual Keypad, PegasusAstro Unity, PrimaLuce Labs PLAY, and the Astromi MGBox utility for the MGPBox.
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Title: Flat Panel/Cover
Description: One really fabulous new product from PrimaLuce Labs is the Giotto flat panel paired with the Alto motor. It first has to be configured and calibrated in PLAY, but after that, it's controlled by ASCOM drivers through NINA. I was relieved to find that it produces excellent flats and has a large enough brightness range to allow me to expose all my flats for exactly 4 seconds, which means I need only one set of flat darks for all seven filters. And so far, the motor seems to function very reliably. The only issue I had was mounting it. It's designed to mount to a Losmandy D-style dovetail, and PrimaLuce's suggestion was to just get a long enough dovetail to reach to the front of the OTA. Um, no. I'm not putting a 50" dovetail on this thing. So my solution was to put a set of rings with small dovetail on the dew shield. My concern there was that it could create flexture. But in reality, with close to 16lbs of focuser, camera, filter wheel, and flattener on the other end of the scope, four pounds of flat panel stuff on the front has not been an issue.
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Title: The Camera
Description:
Finally in May, the camera arrived from Moravian. This is a C5a-100 and it's a monster with 100 megapixels at 3.76u each. While Takahashi claims a very large image circle for the TOA130 with 645 flattener, I was very concerned that I would have tilt issues or that the stars in the corners would look terrible. Quite the contrary. I see no tilt issues and have been very please with optic performance along the edges and in the corners.
The first thing I did was unhook the camera from the filter wheel and rotate it 180 degrees to create better balance. I decided not to use any counterweights and see how that would work out. So far, with the GM2000 mount, I see no balancing issues at all regardless of rotation angle. The issue I ran into, however, was that giant vinyl-LP-sized filter wheel potentially colliding with the pier depending on the rotation and target. To solve that, Tolga at Tolga Astro had custom 3.5" risers machined for me.
The reason I went with Moravian instead of ZWO or QHY is that (1) this camera is $4,000 cheaper than the IMX461-based camera from ZWO, (2) it uses an industrial sensor instead of the consumer version, and (3) it contains an internal physical shutter, which makes taking darks and flat darks much easier in a remote setting.
It does have one other issue, however. When humidity is over about 60%, dew or frost will form in a football shape in the center of the sensor despite having the sensor window heater turned on to 100%. Moravian acknowledges this as an issue in the first production run and has supposedly corrected it with a stronger heater on subsequent runs. Rather than ship the camera back to Europe for what would be a delay of several weeks or months, Moravian recommended that I wrap a dew strip around the flattener and heat that up before cooling the camera on humid nights. This solves the problem, albeit in not the most elegant possible way. But it does have the advantage of preventing dew from forming on any of the glass in front of the camera.
So far, this camera is producing fantastic results and it gives me a monster fov with this scope.
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Title: Filters
Description: Installing these filters scared the crap out of me. Needless to say, Chroma 50x50mm filters aren't cheap, and I was deathly worried I would scratch or otherwise smudge one of them getting them into the filter wheel. But it went just fine. One tip Tolga gave me was to install them with the most reflective side toward the camera. That seems counterintuitive to me, but I went with it. He knows a lot more about all this than I do.
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Title: The Mount
Description: In June, the 10u GM2000 finally arrived. The crate was half the size of my car! Fortunately, I was able to tip the delivery guy enough to move it into my garage (he was only required to deliver it curbside). Few mechanical things in this world are better than a 10Micron mount. It has been flawless.
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Title: Bench Testing
Description:
I was finally able to put this rig together in my office and start bench testing it. I did the best I could do with cable management, including measuring and ordering custom, weather-resistant robotic USB and 12-volt cables from Digi-Key and USBFireWire. Due to some great posts on CloudyNights, I was able to put the right Moonlite adapters (that came with the focuser) in the image train to achieve focus at about the halfway point in the focuser's draw. It also turned out that I had done all the calculations for the Sagitta OAG correctly and am able to easily achieve focus with it, get plenty of guide stars, and not cast a shadow on the main sensor--all things I was never able to do very well with my C11.
For power and data distribution, I used a PegasusAstro Ultimate v2. I wanted the v3, but it won't ship until November and I already had a v2, which is adequate. I also mounted up a ZWO ASI224MC planetary camera in all-sky mode so I can see what the sky looks like around my target and maybe pull down a few nice Milky Way shots.
Finally, I was able to get rough focus out my window on a power line about a mile away.
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Title: External Electronics
Description:
Obviously, I need a place to store the NUC, a network switch, the 10u control box, the power strip, and all the power bricks for everything. I also had duplicates of all the USB and 12V cables made in case one of them fails. And I also needed a place to store all the gear-specific little tools like Allen wrenches, bolts, washers, and the like. So I drew on past experiences gigging with bands in my college days and got a sound rack. Inside it I put two retractable shelves for access to the electronics, a fixed shelf in the back for the 10u control box (to get it as close to the mount as possible), and a 3U drawer for the cables and tools.
On top, I mounted the MGPBox since it needs access to the open air to send weather telemetry to the mount, and it needs to see the sky for GPS purposes. I also mounted a Nest Gen1 outdoor camera on top so I can see what's happening with my rig. The observatory has cameras, but this camera gives me a very close up view and I can also hear things like mount beeps and the camera fan.
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Title: Field Testing
Description: At last it was time to get this thing outside to see whether I could actually take an image with it and to try to operate it in fully automated mode. It worked fabulously. One thing I was worried about was how close I could get the enclosure to the scope without creating a collision issue. Pretty close, it turns out (actually quite a bit closer than shown in the picture).
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Title: On the Road (without Jack Kerouac)
Description: Off to Santa Fe! The OTA was inside the RV snugly wrapped in blankets on the overhead bed above the cab. But I had to attach most of the mount components and the electronics enclosure to the gear rack on the back of the RV. I must say, the people who tailgated me for 660 miles all the way to the New Mexico desert had waaay more confidence in my ability to attach 300lbs of gear safely to the back of the RV than I did!
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Title: At Deep Sky West
Description: Whoa boy--this place is in the middle of nowhere! All that's out there are snakes, bugs, and a bunch of telescopes. I love it!
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Title: Setup
Description: Unfortunately, the guy who was going to tap the pier for my mounting plate was on vacation the week I went out. So I had to take my tripod to set up with initially. In the next week or two, he's going to move the rig to the pier and ship my tripod back to me (I've got two more scopes I need to get ready here to go out there). But the physical setup went very well, and with Garey's help on the phone, we were able to expose the Digital Loggers switch to the outside world, get Chrome Remote Desktop up and running on the NUC, get the mount plugged into the network with a static IP, and get me plugged into the Boltwood safety monitor.
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Title: Waiting for Nightfall
Description:
All that was left to do was polar align and build a model. Fortunately, that first night, the sky cleared at about midnight and I was able to get polar aligned. At that point, I decided to power cycle everything as a test. Uh oh. The mount would NOT turn on. It just wouldn't. Not remotely and not with the physical rocker switch. I checked all the connections as best I could in the dark, but nothing helped. I then decided that maybe I had blown a fuse in the 10u control box and resigned myself to making the 30-mile drive down the mountain to the nearest NAPA Auto Parts the next morning to get replacements. I went to bed exhausted and dejected.
The next morning, I got up and went to the observatory. I disconnected the 10u control box from the six cables attached to it and took out the fuse. It was fine. Fuuuuudge. I thought I was going to have to sent it, the mount, or both off to Italy for repairs. But I decided to hook it back up and try it again in the daylight. It worked fine--and has ever since. I have no idea why it was misbehaving that night. Tolga thinks it might have been that the stereo cable that supplies the power-on pulse to the control box was not pushed in all the way, which could have even interfered with the operation of the rocker switch. I wish I knew what was wrong so I could avoid having it happen again, but the fact that it's working fine now is okay, too.
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Title: All's Well that Ends Well
Description:
Here you can see my little robot peeking over the edge of the observatory right after the roof rolled back. After two days, I decided it was all good an headed home. But...
I had forgotten to focus the all-sky camera on top of the scope. It's focused well enough to see clouds and even the shape of the Milky Way and some blobby stars. But it's not focused well enough to get anything usable out of it. I also forgot to use my Theodolite app to make a horizon file. Not a huge deal. I'm not ever going to shoot below about 30 degrees at the lowest anyway. But it would be nice to have an accurate horizon file for NINA. I'll take care of these two things when I go back to install the other two rigs. For now, I'm enjoying the dark sky. It's monsoon season for the next couple of weeks there, so my time has been very limited so far. But I'm looking forward to clear skies soon.
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Title: Broadband Test
Description: For completeness, I'm including this broadband test I was able to complete last night. Weather has been really rough, but I managed to squeeze in just a snippet of time on the Iris. This is only one hour of data, but it's a better picture of NGC 7023 than I was ever able to take from home in many hours. Very encouraging. It's still very rough and noisy, but I will get many more hours on this target as soon as I can.
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Title: New tools, new look
Description: This was my first image at Deep Sky West. I was never quite happy with it, but I didn't really yet have a frame of reference. For this iteration, I used GraXpert AI, which really helped expose the faint nebulosity surrounding the main target and also allowed me to use an unlinked SHO palette rather than the Foraxx palette I used on the original. I also used the new BXT 2.0 AI4 with default star sharpening and nonstellar sharpening ramped down to about 0.6. That helped tame the stars, which threatened to overwhelm this view.
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| Emission Nebulas |
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