Starting on the 7th I figured it was a good time to test some things out before the eclipse (smart move)....
So I set up my solar eclipse equipment (50 mm Orion scope with a projection viewer / 30mm Lunt solar scope) on my SkyWatcher EQ5 mount.
Now I've had this mount for over 10 years and it works flawlessly. I figured rather than moving the mini computer over I would just use the hand control. I set everything up in the garage and plugged in the power. Hummm no lights on the hand control, I messed with that for about an hour and then decided oh what the heck, I will pull the mini computer off of the 80mm rig and just use it. So an hour later I had it setup to test it out. 4 more hours and I still couldn't get it to connect. EQMOD would flash and never connect. I used contact cleaner and dielectric grease on the contact for connection etc etc. Finally in frustration I gave up. I set up my SeeStar S50 and ran a test for an hour and it worked great. So I came in the house to watch a bit of TV. Suddenly my connections to the TV started acting up. So I came back to my computer and discovered that my internet connection wasn't working. I reset that with the router and finally got that stuff working. Next morning I took my SeeStar out and set it up for the eclipse. It worked great. (Pictures to follow). After I was done I thought well just for the heck of it lets fire up the laptop and see if I can connect to the mount. Then the laptop started an update. 3 HOURS later it finished and with the eclipse over I tried once again to connect to the mount, no problem, connected on the first try.
The only thing I can figure is that the eclipse was messing with my electronics.......
Thanks for listening to my story, now for pictures. It was partly cloudy here but I was able to get some good images.
Member of the RASC
Been a long day... I've really got to get one of these!
