Veloce 200 Upgrade in Namibia

lukas_demetz

Hi all,

so finally the day(s) has come that the Veloce 200 in Namibia will be swapped with an ASA H8 f2.8 hyperbolic astrograph. I will keep you updated here:

Veloce has been removed from the mount
ASA astrograph has been assembled and put on the mounting plate

We plan on wrapping it up on 1st march 2022 with these:

Mount electronics on the mounting plate
Put on mount and rebalance
Collimate
Check distance from corrector to camera (several 1mm rings are on-site)
Check software settings
Enable new autoguider
-New flats

Will keep you updated 🙂

lukas_demetz

Damn, bad news: We are missing one Losmandy plate to be able to connect the electronics of the focuser on the OTA. Stupid me, I thought we would have a spare one on site 😒

I am sourcing some now and will ship them down to Namibia by the end of this month. I guess that at this point we will put the Veloce back in action and I will take care of the swap once I am on-site at the End of april...

lukas_demetz

First image coming from the new ASA H8 f2.8, which is replacing the Veloce in Namibia.
60 secs Luminance uncalibrated unguided...
Collimation is not yet "good", but as an idea: FWHM 2.0". With the Veloce, we were around 4.5" all the (good) times...

Bin 1x1 seems to make sense with this optics now. But I have to sort out some more quirks before it will be operative 🙂

lukas_demetz

Ok seems that it is working "pretty well". You can now use it. The focus is still not perfect (but pretty good), and the new Chroma filters are a HUGE improvement over the old ones.