First Image, and OAG repairs

Great clear full-moon nights throughout the weekend.  Even on clear nights, the dew forming on the corrector plate each night around midnight pretty-much terminated each session.  Just one photo to show for it, but I learned much and configured my gear better than any previous session...

The moon, using my Williams Optics 80mm refractor, piggy-back mounted on an un-guided polar-aligned LX-200 12" scope.  I didn't record the exposure time.

So, what did I really accomplish this weekend?  First and foremost, I figured out a lot about my off-axis-guider.  The Orion OAG is now focused for my reticle 9mm eyepiece (for guiding) and my 5D mark ii, for the first time ever.

Thoughts on the Orion OAG...  The prism-adjustment knob is poorly designed, with the net effect of my wasting at least 10 hours trying to get an image of a star into the guiding eyepiece.  The prism adjustment screw was incorrectly offset around the prism adjust-plunger, so that the prism remained pointed completely off the optical path of the scope. The knob would do nothing to deflect the prism, hence I saw nothing through the finder eyepiece.

A helpful blog post by Tom Polakis in cloudy-nights from 2004 showed the same problem.  I did some minor surgery on the OAG, got the adjustment pin in the correct position, and voila...  I now can see images in the eyepiece.

As for the image above, I learned all about Maxim DL's screen-strech functions and saving options to adjust the image to make the details visible.  Pre- screen-stretch, nothing was visible except a white circle on the image.  The image is noisy, and not ideally focused, but hey, it's a first.

Finally, after sunrise and dew-evaporation, I used some daylight landmarks to finally get the OAG focus adjusted for the two paths.  With that accomplished, I'm now ready to do some long-exposure photography on the next clear night.  Gotta put all the equipment away now...

Haywood