graemlourens

@Rodd Help me if i missed that somewhere: Whats the designation of this target? Great picture.... very nice colours! You did a great job.

A surprisingly happy update: After several days of careful drying of all components it seems that everything is working as it should! I must have been extremely lucky with the direction the telescope and the shutter were pointing and the rain must have not gone straight into the devices but more 'over' them and the water did not penetrate deep into USB Hubs, Cameras etc. I'll only really see if there are no hidden damages when i do the next real imaging. I was lucky that the past few days we have had extremely hot weather and the humidity in the observatory was around 40% even without a dehumidifier, i suspect this made a huge difference that the water evaporated very rapidly without me having to take everything apart. Looking into the lense and down to the filter wheel and camera i could not see any stains or residue of water. Currently i'm in the process to analyse this mechanical shutter error once and for all with ScopeDome company as i have totally lost the trust in the dome. Hope we get that settled before the nebula season starts again! Thank you for all your kind words & support. Kind regards, Graem

Thank you all very much for your kind words & feedback! I will tomorrow assess the situation and see what are the next steps. Will post you how hard this rainfall hit the equipment. In the shock i forgot to make some pictures. Looks very strange seeing a telescope with a puddle of water infront of the lense Hopefully something many of you never have to see. Kind regards, Graem

Hi everybody. I have to share a sad story. For around 4 years now i have been successfully remotely imaging with the scopedome 3M observatory. Great piece of equipment. It always had one bug though that sometimes with high temperatures the shutter would not open (we thought temperature was the reason). The control hardware needed a restart and then it worked. Together with the ScopeDome guys though we never found the issue and i rather got to live with it. I wrote software that would detect this problem and do a mechanical reboot that then 100% solved the issues. Yesterday while starting imaging a very unexpected cloud arrived and it immediately started pouring rain. The AAG System did its job and told the shutter to close. But it did not... At the time i was 70km away from the observatory, and tried via remote access to do the usual fixes one learns after so many years of operating these kind of devices. Nothing worked. Very unusual! I had to watch my observatory be rained into while i was driving 45 minutes to go and save what was saveable. The irony - when i arrived at the observatory everything was soaking wet, but i had beautiful crispy clear sky again. Just seriously one fat cloud passed... It took me a while to fix the issue, turns out that just rotating the observatory a few degrees did the trick, and the shutter was reacting again. I'll be investigating this further with the ScopeDome people. Now to the reason i am turning to you guys & gals here: Does anyone have experience with how to handle equipment that got a pretty decent amount of rain? My approach was to leave the dehumidifier going the whole night and i didn't touch anything, didn't move anything or unplug. My gut feeling tells me to not move around the water more than it already has, and let evaporation do as little harm as possible. (Obviously i turned off all electronics, except the dehumidifier) Any insight or hard lessons learnt from you would help me rescue whats left. Tomorrow i am going to to the observatory again to see the process of drying, and then one by one turn on all electronics, to see what survived the unintentional cleaning session. A very painful thing to endure! Kind regards, Graem