I just cannot believe the pin-point pointing accuracy that I am now getting.
I have switched from my Meade mount to the Takahashi
NJP. It is so much more solid and accurate. It has a polar scope within
the mount, so the initial polar alignment is fast and easy. I am now able to
measure my usual polar accuracy to less than 60 arc-seconds. In fact two nights
ago I had +6 a-seconds in DEC and +36 a-seconds in RA
for me this is unbelievable.
Summer has come and it is still hot and very humid at night even after the sun
sets. Temperatures are still in the high 80's. On top of this discomfort and
because of the almost daily rain, the mosquitoes are everywhere by the thousands.
I am running a Mosquito Magnet, but I still need to be in long pants, and covered
with mosquito repellant. You can see my motivation for moving towards client/server
solutions to run the telescope and camera from indoors. Because of the ever
possible rains, I am still not comfortable with using a scripting program alone
and just going to bed. But I am at least partially successful with remote controls
under client/server. My laptop sits next to the mount and camera at the end
of the driveway, data flows over my wireless network, and for the last two nights
I have been inside at my office PC with air-conditioning and no bugs while running
the CCD and mount from indoors.
I can still see the equipment from my office. The best imaging software does
not yet run in this mode, so I have to use a less capable program. When something
looks really good, I just run outdoors for a few minutes and start-up the better
software on the laptop. But from the comfort of my office with the accuracy
that I have been getting, it is just like running a virtual sky operation. After
every slew, each photo is dead center on the imaging chip.
In addition to having a better physical mount, I am also now utilizing T-Point,
sophisticated statistical pointing analysis software. I have run larger numbers
of sampling points, taken by scripted collection programs that use the CCD and
Astrometric measurement techniques. These samples are then statistically used
to create modeling terms which in turn yield highly precise adjustments to slewing
commands. The adjustments from the modeling terms overcome physical pointing
errors such as tube flexture, out-of-round gears, improper centering, non-perpendicularities,
and many more items. The bottom line is very very accurate telescope movements.
June, 2005