Last night, we realised that all the analysis we did on the polar alignment and azimuth axis the night previously had been the wrong way. We were so frustrated! I would like to blame altitude for this, but it appears to be a software issue which told us to move the back end of the telescope up, when in reality we had to go down. This confused us for around an hour but we soon got back to the taking of pretty pictures. Here are some examples of the exposures we did. These observations were taken during a full Moon (you can see the glow of Moonlight in the corner of some of these images, particularly in NGC 253) and we haven't made any calibration images yet; so we will be getting even more spectacular images in the future.
Unfortunately, we didn't manage to do anything with the North 0.4m since the focus and collimation webpages were not accessible and it was too dark to clamber up on the truss and plug a laptop into the back. That was a real shame, but South is doing well and hopefully both will be working perfectly well soon. One problem we noticed is that when we focus the telescope, the collimation goes off - you can see an example of off-collimation/focus in the image of the Trifid Nebula (check out the shape of the stars). There is also an issue with drifting which is seen in the largest exposures but this is still pretty good (see the stars in the Trifid).
We came up for the last time today to do some last minute fixes and just as we're about to finish up for good, Jacob clipped the emergency stop button and everything went into shutdown. Fortunately we had Mark at the other end of a phone to help us out, but we currently waiting to check for everything to be good before we leave. We can't be too mad at Jacob, it was his birthday yesterday and he was working so hard, he didn't get to celebrate it, so hopefully we can manage to go out tonight in Maui proper, if this emergency stop ever gets fixed!
