M 31 again ater a disaster strickened night.

[+Graham]

Well if it could go wrong it did tonight.

First disaster and one which gets me the numptey of the year award was to send the scope to its home position from park only to discover from the huge crash and grinding of gear teeth that this stupid prat had forgotten to open the obsy roof.

Result one drive gear ripped off its shaft.

I had to re drill and tap the locking grub screw before I could replace the gear cog back into the drive train.

Problem number 2 came from hitting the emergency power off button to the mount when I heard the crash.

This caused the computer and the mount to get out of sync.

So I had to undo both clutches hold onto the scope and run through the 'park and home ' positions several times until the mount and the computer finally made up its mind where each position was.

Lock off the clutches and realign the scope.

Then the other computer decided that my Canon 350 did not exist.

So its reload the drivers change usb leads ect ect until it finally started working.

Lined up on M 31 set the Camera to ISO 800 and started some test subs.

Settled on 30 second subs.

Set up BYE to take 200 subs and off it went.

By sub 11 the clouds had rolled in and that was that.

So after what can only be described as an interesting night I ended up with this photo.

10 Subs stacked in DSS along with 11 darks and flats.

Edited August 2, 2012 by Astrotec Limited

[+Ibbo]

thats a result after your problems

[Perkil8r]

Can't grumble at that, nice capture.