General Updates
November 17th, 2009
The apparently never ending bad weather has put a real dampener on astronomy related activities over the last month or so, clear nights have been few and far between, and when we get them I always appear to be somewhere else!
The south east of England took a good battering over the weekend from a storm, wind speeds were expected to gust up to 85mph. A good test for the shed as this was the worst weather it has had to face since construction, I’m happy to report that everything stayed intact, though I have spotted some ingress of water around the window, another job for the weekend.
Post storm I spent some more time trying to improve the declination backlash of the Sphinx SX mount, with mixed success. I stripped the mount down as far as possible and spent time trying to understand how it is held together and what needs to be adjusted. I adjusted the worm gear as that had some lateral movement, tightened the ring under the declination clamp as I noticed the shaft had some free play, and readjusted the worm to drive mesh.
All this work didn’t quite have the hoped for jump in improvement, guidemaster still reports a declination backlash of 10000 milliseconds! Ten seconds is frankly awful, and I was pretty disappointed that all my hard work resulted in such a minor improvement.
Round about this time is when I noticed guidemaster and ASCOM giving me some odd errors about starbook firmware versions, now this is a brand new starbook received as a replacement for my broken one. One of the first things I had done upon turning it on for the first time was to check the firmware was at the most recent release, and indeed to said v21. However, 21 is not the same as 2.1, a silly mistake on my part and great advert of good practice in logically naming your software releases.
So I updated the firmware and that certainly seems to have improved matters, the declination movement is far more positive now hich should allow me to tighten down the worm / gear mesh a little more.
Slow progress then, but there is movement!