After pimping my scope over the last months with the many cloudy nights I really had to know if my system was working as it should.This was the 1st night out with full computer control on my scope, it can now automatically go to any object you wish to see, in seconds. Futhermore, it has been fitted with a guidescope that enables longer exposures than 1min. Because of many light from our village I also had to add a filter that filters this light out.
After setting up the scope, aligning and focusing I was ready to take exposures, but then the clouds came. I was able to make 3 5min ISO800 exposures though, during the 4th rain started to fall, so the whole thing had to go inside very quickly. There were many clouds so you also see them a little bit on the picture.
The result was not bad for the 1st time. Here you see M51, it is a spiral galaxy that is "eating" its neighbor galaxy, NGC5195. They are 37,000,000 lightyears distance from us.
The picture is not very good because of the difficult weather conditions, but the computer guiding of the scope works perfect. You can click now on an object on the computer screen, and the scope will go there automatically. Furthermore the autoguiding with the extra telescope also works very good. In total the system test was ok, now I have to wait for the next really clear night to test long exposures.
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