The White Telescope at the "Bog" in Schomberg is back in action again with a new ®-rpm drive motor. Andreas has modified the mounting plate to hold it and added a new reduction gear, giving a much stronger drive. Dan and I reinstalled it Tuesday night (May 30th) and did the first auto guided, long exposure CCD images with this scope.

Dan used his ST6 camera at prime focus of the 12½" and I used the club's ST4 autoguider through my C5 and x-y platform, riding piggyback. The Norm/club laptop displayed the ST4 tracking info in realtime as well as a graph of accumulated tracking errors. We spent quite a while getting both CCD chips looking in the same direction and twiddling the tracking parameters. We used ®-second exposures, averaged each second, as input to the tracking function. 9th & 10th magnitude stars were usable.

We were successful in imaging M81 and NGC6946 a beautiful pinwheel galaxy. [See DDM81g.zip and DD6946b.zip on the BBS; the image of 6946 was published on page 12 of the Summer 1995 AstroTent] The night was ideal apart from a steady breeze causing some vibrations in the telescope.

Further experimenting is needed to get the best performance out of this tracking program/guide scope/drive combination, however, we have increased the longest reliable exposure times on this telescope (for an ST6 camera) from 10 seconds to 120 seconds!