Argo Navis

[ZOG]

Well, it arrived here this morning, just in time for Kielder this weekend (weather permitting).

I have to give a vote to Gary and Wildcard innovations for an excellent product and great after sales service

Hopefully an extended first light report will be upcoming after the weekend.

[Doc]

Look forward to it.

[ZOG]

I had a chance to try it out at Kielder last night. Did the fixed alt ref, which is basically pointing the tube straight up and telling the argo that it's at 90 degrees to horizontal, there is a method by which you push the OTA against the backboard and using something like a wixey, measure the exact angle and enter the info into settings, this should give you a failsafe fixed alt ref from that position in future, but of course, I dont have a wixey, and neither did anyone else on the field, so I just set it at 90 degrees.

Next a two star align, to be as accurate as possible I used the 5mm plossl for this and aligned on Betelgeuse and Capella. Must have been close as the warp factor was 0.2 something. (Warp is the difference between the actual scope movement and the distance the computer thinks the scope should move between the 2 alignment stars)

Tested on the usual suspects, M36, 37, 42, 45, and Saturn. Every one bang in the FOV of the 26mm EP OK so far so good so tried for M81. Excellent, M81 and 82 in the FOV. What I didn't realise was if it had hit 81 properly, then 82 wouldn't have been seen, but hey, a 2 for 1 view cant be bad.

Now for the acid test, M51, slewed the scope, no M51. Now I've tried this galaxy several times in the past with the goto on the SLT mount that I knew was working and never saw it. I thought that using the 12 inch would almost certainly give me a view, so I blamed the argo, told it to find saturn again, and this time it just missed, worrying.

There is a facility to do a realign on any object that you have in the FOV so I re aligned Saturn and checked out the usual suspects again. Great, and this time M81 bang centre of the FOV. Tried M51 again.......nothing.

I was muttering things like "Oh dear" when Steve (Paxo) showed up, this guy hits Messiers as well as any goto so he took over the scope and manually looked for the target, and had problems. There was a very small and faint fuzzy there, but not distinguishable as M51. Oh well slew to M37 again to check the argo is still working and got a error message "no alignment performed", this is getting more annoying by the minute and £500 worth of gear is in imminent danger of being thrown into the stream. Did another fixed alt ref and 2 star align and it hit all of the Auriga clusters, and missed all of the Ursa Major galaxies. Switched off, went for a coffee, came back later, set up, and it's hitting every target again including some nice clusters that I haven't seen before including M53 which resolved nicely in the 13mm Nagler. Unfortunately by this time the dew was having a major influence on everything, even the inside of my flight case was wet and phillydees hairdryer was working overtime.

I decided to give up just after 1 am

Having read the documentation when I got home I noticed that the unit does have issues with temperature (it was -4 last night) so much so that it has a built in heater but this can only be used on an external power supply. The encoders can suffer in the cold as well, so maybe this was the cause of the hit and miss performance last night. I'll have to delay my final verdict until it gets warmer or I get a power supply. What I will say is that when it worked, it worked very well. I have an issue with the length of the supplied encoder cable which is only 1 metre long and results in a lot of bending to use the thing. A replacement 2 metre cable from Wildcard in Australia costs the equivelent of about 35 quid and another 39 quid shipping plus import vat. Luckily, Telescope Servis in Germany stock them for 30 euros so one will be on order tomorrow. This will enable me to fit a stalk to the dob base so there will be no bending when using the argo.

I also discovered that it's no good having a dewshield on a flextube when the centre section is open, I really need to get a shroud sorted out as it spoiled my night.

So, instead of a complete report, I'm afraid that this must be classed as a work in progress...................Watch this space