some successes

While we didn't get everything done that we wanted, it was a good evening at Manuel's.

Headed over in the earlier evening. Caught him in the middle of a Skype call. I watched a bit of NASA TV. Had dinner together.

I rigged up the new ADM hardware. D Series adjustable rings with plate adapters. Long dovetail bar with RCX end pieces. After first, when I unpacked everything, I thought we were short some screws. But it was OK. For some reason, only 3 screws are used to secure the dovetail brackets to the Celestron OTA. And, though I had forgotten to bring my Allen key sets, Manuel had all the tools necessary for the install, including Metric and Imperial sets, and regular screwdriver.

Needed to move the Telrad base slightly around the Celestron 8" SCT.

We set up in the driveway, or rather lane way, behind his place. I wasn't sure it would be a good idea but it proved OK. Easier to lug clear to and fro. And the sight lines were not as bad as I thought they'd be. I think he wanted to use this space for privacy reasons. Certainly we did not have to deal with any other humans.

Another thing I wanted to check in the evening was that the Orion mount was working OK. That the set-up was good, that using a multi-star alignment would work as required, and that we'd be able to track well. But we had a devil of a time with it. We received many ALIGN FAIL reports from the hand controller. I tried it. He tried it. We looked up stupid stars in Stellarium.

It was very frustrating. Every once in a while it would work. So, I knew it was something we were doing. He wanted to swap the mount but I insisted it was a user error. I didn't know what we were doing wrong exactly. But it had to be the stars we were selecting.

Wondered if the big huge dish heater was chewing too many amps. We shut it off.

Manuel wanted to image. And try out the new gear. The plan was, after we sorted all the other issues, he'd bolt up the CCD camera. Actually, I think he wanted me to do the bulk of the steps, i.e. he wanted me to capture the image or be responsible for that. Nice gesture. But when we tried to connect the camera to the OTA, it seemed that there was something missing, some adapter. He looked through all his gear and couldn't find it. He wondered if he had loaned it to Mr Soler. We had to abandon imaging for the night.