"I honestly think [I] ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. . ."

December 12. So the forecast is for rain. I spent some time (under a deep blue sky) taking the kit down and packing it away in what will become its storage cases and maybe its travel cases. I'll never be satisfied with the exact division of hardware into a reasonable number of boxes, but the first approximation for use in the sideyard or up at the cul de sac need not be perfect. By the time I launch any sleep-deprived multi-state black-sky odysseys, I'm sure the scheme will have been refined. ("Refined" means wholly unanticipated sources of confusion will have arisen.)

Today while Christmas shopping it dawned on me to pack the guide telescope on its side rather than upright (Losmandy mounting plate against the side of the case rather than against the bottom) to avoid the need to remove the top collimation bolts. I tried it... D'oh! Much better.

Can't mess in the cases without returning to a favorite obsession: cable management. There's a jellyfish of assorted wires in the guide-gear box. I labelled three heretofore unlabelled cable ends as I put them away. That's useful, but I could see the cat's cradle taking form as I dropped wires, hubs, and adapters beside the guide 'scope. They were laughing at me.

Why not use much shorter cables? Look: mount the USB hub in the middle of the DSBS adapter and run one long USB A/B cord from the computer. Use very short cables (6-18 inches) for signals to the guide port, CCD camera, and guide camera. If they'll reach at all, they'll reach no matter where the telescopes aim. Think "wiring harness" rather than portugese man o'war. Likewise, instead of connecting the guide port and the Losmandy controller with a 15-foot RJ11 (RJ45?) anaconda, use a short coiled cord (I already have one of those). Duffous! All this is obvious! I'll deal with the power cords later, maybe by folllowing the same path.

A little rummaging here and on eBay may have eliminated 20 or 30 feet of digital spaghetti. With spares and alternatives and shipping, the whole kit came to about the price of 1 USB A/B cable at Office Max. Bricks and mortar -- Bah! [An hour after sunset, the sky did cloud over and by morning we'd had half an inch of rain.]

Metaphor alert: refining, arise, dawn, return to, jellyfish, cat's cradle, snakes, path, spaghetti... Stop it!

The Jellyfish Nebula. IC 443 in Gemini.

 

 

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Text & Photos by David Cortner
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