Well, it’s been a year since my last update but not because I’ve forgotten about this. A lot has happened since then.
I’ve started working on a 6″ mirror. It’s just about polished out and ready for figuring. I now understand why so many ATM’ers have unfinished mirrors from ~20 years ago…
I acquired a (Celestron branded) Losmandy G-11 and become addicted to Astrophotography. My primary scope for photography has been the Astro-Tech AT90EDT APO. At 600mm, it’s been very forgiving of alignment and tracking errors which is necessary since I currently lack an autoguider. This brings me to the next project I’ve been working on; using the Raspberry Pi to facilitate astrophotography.
I picked up a Point Grey FireFly MV on ebay for cheap. I have written INDI drivers (https://github.com/bgilsrud/indi-ffmv) to allow it to be used as a guide camera and am in the process of writing an INDI driver to use the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO’s as a guide interface. The Pi could also use the gphoto INDI driver to control my (unmodified) Rebel T1i and maybe in the future the encoders from the Celestron Advanced AstroMaster computer.
My new years resolution will be to update the blog more frequently rather than waiting until next year ;).
Ben Gilsrud's Astroblog 