Filled up many pages of the astronomy notebook today.

First up was the dome rotation project for the New Forest Observatory. A couple of broken things to fix in the stepper motor controller and everything is up and running again in my workshop. I need to get back down to the NFO again this weekend and see if Greg and I can get it to work in situ and link it up to the telescope itself. If this can be made to work it will make Greg's life much easier - the mini-wasp system is a fairly tight fit to the dome aperture.

Automatically rotating a telescope dome so that the slit points where the telescope is looking is a lot more complicated than you might expect.

Happy that the stepper motors are working, I've left them tracking a a long test and turned attention to the guide camera which was having a lot of problems with random noise. I've taken things apart. Changed the earthing. Removed a few unused components and generally fiddled about. I got it working ok on the laptop running on batteries. Plugging in the laptop power made the noise much worse.

Encouraged, I put it back in the observatory and carefully switched everything back on, one thing at a time, until the whole system was operating. The frames from the guidecamera now look much better.

Like many of these things, I'm not entirely sure what I've done, but I'm hopeful it has worked.

The guide camera is a simple webcam adapted to take long exposures and remounted in a special case that allows it to work with my homemade off axis guider.