First Light!

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After nearly a year of building and testing, first light was finally achieved at my new remote observatory. An animation of the assembly can be seen in an earlier DailyImage:

http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/index.html?main.php?date=20170613

Last week, the weather was good enough for a few hours to allow the first remote test. This image of NGC891 is a combination of 10 integrations of 10 minutes, 1 each for RGB and 7 for Luminance. The signal to noise ratio is already better than that of a 4.5 hour integration at the telescope's previous location in Beilen!

After the test, it started raining again, so it was a relief to watch the dome shutter close after the test. Otherwise a nightly 110km drive to Germany would have been needed to save the observatory.

There is still some distortion in the star images due to a misalignment of the camera (chip not at right angles to the optical axis of the telescope), but that has been corrected last week.

Now confidence is building to allow the observatory to operate fully autonomous, controlled by a software package called ACP Scheduler.