Monday, September 03, 2012

TPoint actually OK!

The lads reassembled the C14 with cleaned corrector plate on Sunday afternoon. Tim used the C14 that evening for imaging. In fact, he imaged with the SCT proper, and used the piggybacked refractor for guiding. He had a good session. Everything worked quite well. And he got some good imaging data.

Steve told me, during the drive home, that they noticed the pointing was working great. They hit their targets and they were near the centre of the eyepiece field. And they attributed this to the proper setting of the Paramount balance knobs, which had been found loose. What?!

I was very pleased to hear this. It takes some of the pressure off building an improved TPoint model now. It explains why we were getting good performance on one side of the meridian while poor on the other. It showed that we need to periodically make sure the knobs are adjusted correctly.

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