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Complete obsy from Avalon

perfrej

By perfrej
in DIY Observatories

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  • 3 months later...
Elio

Elio

Posted
Posted
Hi guys 

here one of those foolish (really we are two!) that has spent money and time to setup a Personal Remote Observatory under dark skies, hoping to catch the best sky conditions, against all the things we usually owe to do and takes us away from deep-sky passion (job, sons, WIFE, house in countryside, and so on...).


We have put down the foundation-stone (it's much much more, I have to say!)  and we are testing all stuff to refine the calibration of the whole system.


The most important feature, wherever we are in the whole world, we can start a deep-sky astrophotography session and Merlino (its core indeed) could play solo till morning, with all the safety and the best reliability  :)


In few words... the one life dream is coming true!  :grin:


Soon will be published the website observatory containing all specs and technical data, we are in late with this but the time runs more and more, despite our efforts. 



Here you can see "Merlino" at the first installation in the southern Tuscany countryside: Luciano Dal Sasso has perfectly managed the  process and kept misfortune far away as he can, and the same night we were ready to take shots, but the weather has changed and has gone against us... 


Two days later we were able to test the setup and the sky getting 10x1200s sub without any filter (really we still have to clean them and put in fw) no flats and no dark, just a quick processing in Pix  


The target is NGC5907 in Draco, GSO RC8" @f/5.8 - Atik One (694) on Avalon M-Uno.


Work in progress, see you soon



Cheers,

Elio 

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schmeah

schmeah

Posted
Posted

That's great Elio! I'm really interested also to see how you progress with this. Two questions. What about a dew shield? Doesn't seem like it would fit on the Edge SCT inside the Merlino with the roof closed. Does it have the motorized polar alignment feature that I've seen on the Avalon site? And if so, how automated is this?

Derek

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  • 2 weeks later...
maurogh

maurogh

Posted
Posted

Hi Derek,

I’m Mauro, the other foolish guy sharing the Avalon Merlino P.R.O. with Elio. He is presently in vacation and I don’t know if he can read the forum. I will take the responsability to respond to your questions.

We do not have any dew shield on our scope. It is a RC so it doesn’t have the corrector plate and  therefore it is much less prone to dewing. In any case the Merlino control board includes a power plug for a dew heater strip and we wrapped one around the scope. Up to now we hadn’t any dewing problem. Even in case of SC telescope, the heather strip should be sufficient to avoid dewing. This assertion is from my experience with a Celestron 11” EdgeHD and it is valide for our weather conditions.

Yes, we have the motorized polar alignment system on our M-one. We used it to polar align the mount at the first installation, few days ago. The procedure, using Astrotortilla Polar Alignment Tool, took only about twenty minutes to get an alignment around 2-3 arcmin from the pole. Since this is not an usual operation to perform in an observatory, I don’t believe its automation is a real need. However, knowing Luciano’s love for the perfection we could expect even this feature in the future.

Mauro

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schmeah

schmeah

Posted
Posted

Thanks for the update Mauro, that's great!  I am really looking forward to seeing how you gents get along with this. With no encoders or homing sensors, I never really thought of my M Uno as a remote capable mount, but perhaps... 

Derek

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maurogh

maurogh

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Posted

The M uno mount in our observatory is provided of home position micro switches in both axes. Merlino software has a routine to put the mount in home position in few seconds. After this operation we can slew to the first star with a good precision. In particular we get that stars well inside our FOV of about 28 x 38 arcmin at the first attempt. I believe the micro switches are mounted only in the M uno to be installed in Merlino (or, may be, in other remote setups), being useles for local use.

Mauro

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