Things have slowed down

 Summer is in full swing in Kyushu. The temperature has been hovering around 30C+ everyday. The 70% humidity makes it darn right hot. 

With the heat, things have slowed down around Home Sweet Home. I’ve finished tiling the living room and entry area. 

I have been experimenting with wallpaper installation. It was not that hard to do. 

I prepared the walls the same way as if I were going to paint it. Actually, I am going to paint it! I learned the hard way about taping the walls in Japan. It looks great until an earthquake occurs. Many of the drywall seams cracked where I had applied tape. None of the walls cracked that had wallpaper. That’s when I decided to wallpaper everything first and paint later.

The wallpaper has an adhesive back. Cut to size, match up the seams, work out the bubbles and wrinkles, and that’s it. DIY wallpaper is economical, easy to install, and it looks great. It will look even better with a coat of paint.

I have been making progress towards an automated observatory. The mount has been calibrated, but more work is needed. I'll be creating another TPoint model to get my polar alignment below 10 arc/sec...sorry for the technical jargon. This stuff takes time and patience. Once I'm happy with the polar alignment, then I can concentrate on pointing. Pointing is good as the image appears on the CCD wherever the scope is pointing, but it's not exactly centered. Once pointing accuracy has improved, I can move on to tracking. I'm way behind schedule (weather gremlins), but things are improving. I did my first autofocus with FocusMax 4 and that went very well. Plate solving with Image Link has been a challenge, but I think I have some of the bugs worked out...I think (wish).