CN10 -- new focuser -- first light

Installed a 2" Orion Crayford-Style focuser to the massive Orion CN10 Newtonian due to wobble and shake with the original rack & pinion.  Additionally, this focuser accepts the Baader RCC I Rowe Coma Corrector without needing to be modified and without adapters, custom spacers, etc.  

Started setup at 8pm with plenty of light left to level the Celestron CGEM DX mount, stick on the counter weights and the OTA and cameras.  With trees now grown so tall to permanently block polaris, used a best guess approach with the mount in the drive.  After focusing on Epsilon Serpentis, started phd2 to begin a drift alignment.  Remarkably, started at only 15.45' off (without using the polar scope)...just dead reckoning.  After an initial over correction, adjusted to 2.66' after several minutes of drift.

Initial frame used for plate solving (before polar alignment) showed strong streaking in the top half of the frame (with long dimension of the frame aligned with the OTA)..strongest in the top left.  Since it's a used focuser, began testing the three tilt adjustment hex screws.  Began by loosening the top right and top left hex pins and tightening the hex screws (to tilt the top inwards).  

Screenshot of Picasa showing example frames after (left) and before (right) from the first tilt adjustment from the upper left and lower left corners of the frame:



Although this adjustment showed remarkable promise, took the risk of a second adjustment to see if further improvement was possible.  Again, loosened the hex pins on the top left and top right and tightened the hex screws.  This additional effort did not result in significant change either way (may have maximized adjustment in this dimension).  Tried one final time by loosening the bottom hex screw and then tightening the hex pin.  Also no significant change.  Further adjustment in the future is likely warranted.

Set up a schedule for NGC 6992 (Eastern Veil nebula) with 40x120s exposures per run at ISO1600 to repeat until 04:30.  Ultimately, the scheduler ran until twilight ended at 3:30 resulting in ~95 light frames.

Final image after integration in Astro Pixel Processor:




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