More of the Moon
February 1st, 2010
We had an entire weekend of clear skies! Unfortunately that means we also had a full moon as apparently the two things are connected these days, or at least that’s what it feels like. Lacking the ability to take photos of anything else (I need a 4 x Barlow for Mars) I spent a lot of time testing guiding with the sphinx.
On the first night I used the excellent EQAlign to get my polar alignment as close as possible. The guiding after this was massively improved in declination with very few corrections required, probably the best dec guiding I’ve seen from the sphinx. The RA however was all over the place with very rapid oscillations that the guiding had problems with.
Second night, I spent a lot of time getting the balance of the mount as accurate as possible, had another go with EQAlign to tweak that side then tried again. The result? Excellent RA guiding, but now the declination is a mess showing a slow oscillation as it seems to drift first one way then the other. The horrible declination backlash of the sphinx made this very difficult to manage and adjusting the movement speed or aggression settings only sped up or reduced the oscillation period.
I really like the sphinx, I’ve had a great time with it and learnt a lot, but I think the time is coming for it to be replaced. It is overloaded these days, and the performance of the mount suffers because of this.
Anyway, before heading to bed on Saturday night I took a stack of 100 images of the full moon through the 250mm reflector.
