Last updated on February 27th, 2022 at 09:06 pm

First night out with the new equipment.  Equipment list for tonight:

Canon DSLR XSi with IR Cut Filter

Astroberry

ASI294 guider

RedCat 51mm 

Skywatcher Az-GTi mount 

TBD setup of Astroberry Server

BOM for setup with links to each site

Get Cloudy Nights posts related to the One Sky and the SkyWatcher Az-GTi

Building the web site with terraform and macdev scripts to build the workstation

Night started out very frustrating since I could not get the polar alignment to work at all and the mount goto system would not work at all.  Started to just manually point telescope and camera and can see this in the first shot of the Great Orion Nebula.

Lesson #1 learned tonight: telescope mounting for the EQ mode of the Skywatcher Az-Gti.  Once I figure out the proper way to mount the telescope things worked much better.  Late night but later pictures of the Great Orion Nebula and Beehive cluster so how much progress was made.

Lesson #2 learned tonight:  Focus on the OAG and main camera will required the helical focuser for the guide camera.  The focus for being able to see a star in the guide camera verus nothing is very, very tied and not enough play to allow slight out of focus.  Thought I ordered but did not so this will put the auto guiding back a couple of days and we will have to try that again in a couple of nights.

Looking forward to getting back into the Astroberry setup tomorrow night.  Time to tackle the polar alignment process.