New equipment

Over the last few days, I managed to get my hands on a massive new tripod, an new motor for my declination axis (haven't had one in years) and a handful of drive clutches that were actually machined by someone who CARED.  We had a little star party Saturday night, but while a lot of fun was had by all, I broke a basic rule of any science/engineering/mechanical project. A wise person will only change one thing at a time when experimenting. But me-wise? HAH! I laugh at wisdom. I started the night like this-

1. A new tripod,
2. An untested and improvised means of attaching my mount to it,
3. A new motor in a place where for years I have only had hand controls,
4. freshly-designed, cut, and untested mounting hardware for that motor,
5. A location I was not familiar with,
6. Friends around rather than doing all of this alone like usual.
7. There may have been some single malt whisky involved
8. My hand controller (which runs all of those motors) Started randomly changing its mind about which hemisphere we're in.

In addition, I still hadn't had a night shooting with the improved parts mentioned below. So a LOT of variables were being dealt with at once.

The result is that when I encountered problems, there were FAR too many things to track down...which led to some truly hilarious results, as well as one of the most astonishing astronomical images ever created-

 I doubt I will ever be able to equal this incredible achievement.





In time, I finally figured out what was wrong, but was running out of night. So when I finally started shooting, I ended up making mistakes that made most of the night's pictures useless (but well-tracked-yay!). In the next few days, I'll properly sort out the entire new setup, and the difference should be considerable from what I was working with before. Scott shot a LONG set of subs of M13, while Mark was getting video of Saturn that should be stackable into something pretty special; I'm looking forward to seeing their results for the night.