First light !

On july 14th, our Bastille day in France, I assembled the Losmandy Titan and the Celestron 11 inches telescope inside the dome. I used the standqard tripod as the pilar came with the wrong holes and I have to modify it; I plan also to make it 50cm longuer to have the C11 telescope in reach for the southern horizon (Scorpio is great at the moment and partially hidden by the lower part of the shutter/wall.

I have also started the installation of the control room with a large screen but direct connection to Dome Tracker & Titan mount for the moment (I plan a Moxa serial port Ethernet hub for later on).

Tony H, a friend and neighbourg who has his own observatory, visited and we did some visual observation of some typical summer objects: M8, M20, M16, M17, M23, M24, M25, then M57, M13, M101, some binaries and Saturn!

The mount was controled with the handheld controler (Gemini 1 system) but it was also connected to PRISM software; it did handle the dome so on regular basis, the dome was realigned to the telescope. We had to wait sometimes after a large GoTo but I forgot to reduce the whecking time in Prism (1min standard):

At the end of the night, I installed a PL1M (QHY5) CMOS camera just to do some tests; here is the focusing on Saturn (I am missing a motorized focuser!):

And a simple 20sec (dark substracted) picture of globular cluster M13: