Electronic finder

At last I replaced the finderscope with an electronic finder using an old PL1M (QHY5) CMOS camera and a C-mount lens:

 

The result is ok and with 10sec exposure I typically get good recognition of the field. Here is a comparison of the image seen by the eFinder and PRISM skymap (Zoom 16 = 7.5°x7.5° field):

I used Astrometry.Net to get the image astrometry and result is:

Size:5.13 x 4.11 deg
Pixel scale:28.9 arcsec/pixel
Orientation:Up is -175 degrees E of N (ok, not so bad)

The fiber tip at the main telescope is at coordinates X=300, Y=317 on this eFinder image.



A side note as I'm observing tonight. The Be star HD177648 is close to another well visible star. For the guiding, I  used a 20 pixels window to ensure the autoguiding doesn't pick the other star - it worked!

And the guiding window:

 

And some problem I am now facing... I updated the Gemini ASCOM to latest version and I find some strange behaviour. Somehow, I still have trouble handling the Losmandy mount with the Gemini system and some of the trouble seems software related. What is trange is that I have seen the same behaviour at OHP with the NEQ6 (EQMOD) and several map software including PRISM. There must be a parameter which is not set right somewhere. Anyway, the symptom is hat I goTo a target and the telescope goes to a location like 0.5° East. Need some more work to diagnose the problem and resolve it!