Hi all,
I hope you don't mind if I post some more 'stupid/insane challenges'. My observatory unfortunately is in clouds and ice and snow and the road is closed, but last time I was up there I took my old mount with me, a Vixen GP-DX with Synscan EQ5 upgrade. I wanted to play around with it a bit, to set it up as camera lens unit with my ASI183MC. So I have it standing in my office here at sea level.
This afternoon clouds vanished partially. But due to some cabling limitation, I couldn't bring the mount outside. Instead, I had it look through a window:
I pre-aligned the mount looking up the orientation of my appartements wall in openstreetmap and then checked what I can see from there. It's facing SSE and the window opening was just high enough that I could get an approximate 60 degrees arch at declination -20. Yes, aligning to the NCP with reference stars south of the celestial equator...
I did it manually, not using the mount control, to have better control over where I'm pointing. I did one shot close to meridian, one as far east as possible, and a final one between the two. PAE was some 3 degrees, and easy to correct. The star moved perfectly along the guide lines.
Next I reset the mount to home position, made sure the camera is really pointing to the NCP, then checked what I can see there through the window. I wanted to try Thors Helmet area, but that was already too high. So I aimed in Canis Major where the DSS image showed some nebulosity. Well, I didn't really see it in the image. That was too much of a challenge maybe. It's not perfectly in focus either. But this is a 120s exposure, unguided. Only at 135mm FL, but the PA definitely worked really well even under this more than extreme conditions.
Hy, this is absolutely amazing work of yours! If you're able to see stars, your routine will do PA