It has been a fairly crazy couple of months for me and all the others at my company. And there is much work ahead. This work led to missing a month’s post: There was no post for December 2014. But I won’t miss January 2015.

Over the last two weekends, I actually made some progress with upgrades to the observatory. First of all, it got a thorough cleaning. A movable roof does not seal tightly, so there was plenty of red Anza dust everywhere. It is now in tip top shape. Birds occupying the roof motor housing prevented any observing that first weekend of work. I was able to put the self guiding filter wheel on my new SBIG STXL-6303E camera. A step forward!

On the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, I was able to test out the current set up. Everything worked fine even if I was forced to shut down early due to high winds. I also installed the filters (Astrodon LRGB, Ha, SII, and OIII). And I connected the camera to a computer and it worked.

The real tests are ahead, when I rebuild the setup of the last two years and get it tuned for easy use. That is many weekends of work. I am looking forward to it.