Back in business

A few nights ago my main telescope mount started to act erratically. It would swing uncontrollably in the RA axis and resetting power didn't help.  Thinking the worst - a bad motor control board or motor, I removed the RA motor and tested it out.  Sure enough, when the RA motor was connected to the DEC axis the problem occurred. The issue is definitely correlated to the motor.

I contacted Ed at DeepSpaceProducts for the availability of a new motor. after describing the issue to him he suggested I first open the motor's encoder casing and check to see if the encoder assembly is OK since it sounded like an encoder problem to him. I found that the encoder disk was loose. Once tightened the issue was resolved. That saved me about $180. And, as usual, Ed is more interested in getting his customers back in business than he is just selling product.

Testing on real imaging last night reveals that the RA motor is fixed.

Not to waste a clear night, I set up the William Optics 102mm APO to capture some galaxies. Here is M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy.

The Triangulum Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 3 million light-years (ly) from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is catalogued as Messier 33 or NGC 598. The Triangulum Galaxy is the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, behind the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. It is one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed with the naked eye.

M33 - Nov 22, 2017
WO GT102 - F/5.5 29x300sec QHY10 Camera