After 15 hours on the mountain, we got first light on the South 0.4m. The first images looked a little strange (see the bottom image) because the telescope wasn't focussed yet. Once this was done, we checked the drift on the stars and saw they were moving south on the images. To fix this, Jacob and Wayne moved the azimuth axis (by around 0.75 inches) and the drift was significantly improved. We then checked the polar alignment of the telescope by moving between a bright star at the zenith (i.e. with the telescope pointing straight up, and this was our reference star which we made sure lined up in the centre) and two other stars. One star at -2h away in right ascension (RA) (due East) and the other +2h in RA (due West). The stars were offset from the centre and by interpreting the pattern, we could deduce that the telescope was overshooting the pole and wasn't correctly aligned. We corrected for these using the computer link up to the telescope and after some extra focussing and collimation attempts (see the donut shaped stars in the second to bottom image), we called it a day (night) at about 2am in the morning; we needed to figure out a better drift/collimation and pointing model (since we were as good as we could get by eye) and that would require some brain cells. Altitude is a funny thing, I won't mention the hour we spent searching for sources (even trying to find the Moon) before we realised we were 15 degrees off from where we thought we were pointing in RA. We really shouldn't have been off by that much! However, 15 degrees in RA is the equivalent to 1 hour - that gave us a big hint to what the problem was and yes the laptop we were using to control the telescope was 1 hour off local time..... I definitely blame the altitude.
We left the mountain in a significantly better mood than we came up, the images we took were amazing. We had a play around and here are a couple of examples. 60secs exposure on the Eagle Nebula (the famous Pillars of Creation) is shown on the top and for the Dumbbell nebula below it. All I can say is, we were pretty happy bears after seeing these.
Today, we will make a more accurately focussed and collimated system for South and get the North 0.4m to the same stage (now that all the drives are working and ready to go), but we'd better move fast before the cyclone gets here!
