Today I brought one of the astronomy club members out to the observatory in order for him to double check my train of thought on procedures and also to help me troubleshoot the electronic focuser.

The electronic focuser seems to be working fine and the trouble seems to be some type of binding in the mechanics… it seems that part of the problem may be that the focuser knob was not set onto the shaft properly, and although fixing that would be simple, we couldn’t find the right size allen wrench. We noticed that the electronic focuser worked fine when it wasn’t engaged the mechanical focuser. We then tried turning the course focus knob and found it was pretty tight… this could be from the scope not being used for long periods of time and the lubricant hardening. We manual ran the focuser all the way in and out a number of times and that seemed to help alot. We also noticed that there was some sort of ‘catch’ every few turns of the knob… this is how we found that the course focus knob was a bit loose and this was due to the set screw holding it onto the shaft was not lined up with the flat portion of the shaft which keeps the knob from slipping around. I sorted thru all of the allen wrenches in the observatory and found one that fit well enough to get the knob in place, but not enough to tighten it… Ill try to find the right size and bring that next week. I hope that resolves the issue… next step would be to find out how to clean the old lubricant off of the internal focus mechanism and use something silicon based… IDK!

I can’t figure out why, but every once in a while, a driver will disassociate from the MountWizard4 application,  mainly preventing the roof from closing… this, for the most part, is a minor annoyance because it’s easily reconnected with a few mouse clicks… I’ll just need to document the steps.

We had quite a few instances of the computer screen flickering and shutting off… and also it seems that it will turn off after a period of time. I continually go into settings and change this, but I think that it changes back after a computer restart. The screen shutting off and the computer locking after a period of time will stop things like imaging from running.

I want to mention that I can train some basics, but this is a complicated system, and although will perform the tasks required of it, there will be a substantial learning curve that can only be overcome by experience. Don’t be scared… just be prepared to enjoy the journey!

Clear Skies!
Jeff