Must have been contagious, I set the alarm for 1:00 am this morning
to do some imaging.

Stumbled to the observatory without the necessary cups of coffee on
board. Barely got the roof off before the dog nailed a raccoon. (Very
quiet and gentle dog unless hunting and then it won't give up), took
at least a half hour to resovle the matter to everyone satisfaction
(except for the coon)
I then synced scopes on Castor and issued slew commands, The 5" took
off for parts unknown so checked software settings, etc everything
okay, re-synced on Castor and the same thing happened. Finally got
enough coffee and then had the brillant idea that I should check the
mount. Engaged the RA clutch, solved the problem. By then had lost
1-1/2 hours of imaging time.

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 07:52:15 -0700, "Richard Crisp"
wrote:

it has been over two years since I last used my FSQ. It is a great little
scope: nearly an ideal 4" class fast refractor at f/5

Last time I used it I had a somewhat different setup so what I found
yesterday was a lack of the right adaptors to reach focus.

I fussed around with different spacings and adaptors I had and even modified
one with a quick lathe job about 8:45pm last night

anyway about 10pm I finally got it focused and decided to shoot M31 in
Halpha to see what it looks like

here's the result: 2 hours total (6x20 minutes). I haven't shot flats yet
though.

I basically switched from using the FLI DF2 to using a Robofocus. that is
the key change. Something is slipping because when I run the V curve I am
finding a different focus point each time. It is hard to debug fully in the
dark so I will look into it a bit today to see what is happening. Plus I
need to find the Allen wrench I dropped into the yard beside the mount last
night in the dark :-)