testing testing (Blue Mountain)

Tested a bunch of equipment this evening will the digital imagers fiddled, in the Geoff Brown Observatory at the CAO, with their electronic focusers.

I used my old "universal" AC-DC adapter to operate the mount motor and controller. Initially it did not seem to be working correctly but I realised that was because I had it set to 6 volts output and not 9.

I tried Mom's crazy 4mm eyepiece again. On my C8, it yields 500 power! But I thought I'd try it on some tight double stars, such as the Double-Double in Lyra. And you know what? It worked! I could easily split each tight pair. That said, 500x was a hair too much to include both in the Meade orthoscopic field. I borrowed Ian's 5mm which perfectly showed the famous multiple star group, each pair split yet still in the same field. So, the upshot of this is that maybe I'll keep the old 4mm for special applications.

(Curiously, the image quality of the 5mm did not seem, to me, much different than the 4.)

We hit the dew point later in the evening. Everything was soaked. This reminded me that I had not yet tackled the finder scope heater project despite having piles of nichrome wire at home...