Avalon Linear, part 2, fIrst light.

[ollypenrice]

...and the news is good.

Once loaded up in one of the observatories, temporarily on an NEQ6 Tripod, it looked rather nice! The sense of eleasticity in the belts continued to worry me but it is widely reported that this doesn't matter, and it didn't.

Polar amignment I did only roughly with the polarscope. The adjustments are beautifully smooth and coherent. But then curiosity got the better of me and I set up the guider, played with the parameters briefly, and then ran a 15 minute sub on a random bit of Milky Way. (It turned out to quite an attractive bit, too!)

Round stars edge to edge, corner to corner. There is nowt, as they say, wrong with that...

This is from the TEC140, a long refractor with heavy glass at both ends. Focal length is 980mm, sampling at about 1.8. The FWHM last night was so-so, around 1.7. The guider was a Lodestar binned 2X2 in an ST80, FL 400mm. I've attadched the guide trace from AstroArt 5.

This trace will doubtless improve considerably once I know the mount and, above all, have a serious polar alignment, but I'd had a very long non astro day yesterday and wasn't up to much. What I like about the trace, apart from the very reasonable tracking precision, is its freedom from anything systematic. Backlash builds patters which easily show in the image. The Avalon will not suffer from this.

Anyone rerading my opinions on kit will know how much I like the phrases 'plug and play' and 'just works.' Well last night night I plugged in the Avalon, played and, yes, it just worked.

Now isn't that nice.

Olly

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Looks very nice indeed!

[Tinker1947]

The mount would seem a perfect upgrade from a NEQ6/EQMod just a little matter of clear sky's to be able to use it......Nice write up Olly......

[ChrisLX200]

Wow, performance looks great! Is that arc-sec on the graph? I wish they made a bigger version of this mount.

ChrisH

[swag72]

Wow, performance looks great! Is that arc-sec on the graph? I wish they made a bigger version of this mount.

ChrisH

As I understand it Chris, they are working on a larger capacity mount. Drop Lucianno a line and ask him!

[ollypenrice]

Wow, performance looks great! Is that arc-sec on the graph? I wish they made a bigger version of this mount.

 

ChrisH

In Bin 2 the Lodestar is sampling at 8.46 arcsecs per pixel.

The top and bottom lines represent a pixel on the trace graph and the imaging rig is sampling about 4.5 times more finely than that, so is reamining nicely sub pixel according to my thinking (which may be up a gum tree!) I expect that with a little effort on fine tuning it should be easy to reduce the error from 0.09 to something more like 0.05, which is where wa are with the Mesu. Even as it is, carelessly aligned and first time out, it is capble of handling the TEC/Atik 11000 very happily.

Olly

[sloz1664]

Sounds like a keeper then Olly. Words like plug and play and "it just works" makes you feel soooo good...

Steve

[ollypenrice]

PS Sorry about the typos but I've been unable to use a normal size screen for a few days and I'm too old to read microdot! Now back online with the big ones.

Olly

PS A short rant; whose idea was it to mix 0 and O plus 1 and I in alpha-numeric codes? They should be locked in a room blaring Spice GIrls records until they repent.