With the current run of cloudy nights an unexpected clear spell gave me a chance to try the new spider which I have managed to finish at last; this one being a bit more hi-tech with carbon fibre vanes which feel much more rigid than the aluminium I had used previously. It was a great relief when the improvement was immediately obvious from a fairly rough collimation with plenty of movement left for fine tuning ....This was the facility that I had intended for its previous incarnation but carelessly made a mess of.... Even more pleasing was the result of attaching the guidescope directly onto the Newtonian's tube. Though only attached with a couple of bungee cords the guiding errors I have been chasing for the last year or more had almost completely vanished! I could now kick myself for not accepting that differential flexure had been at the root of the problem all along and I hadn't tried this experiment earlier. At least the doubts I was having that my mount was capable of accurate autoguiding are much diminished now as we move into spring skies and galaxies again. A bright moon is preventing any late pre-meridian chances at Orion and its environs as the winter constellations slip away.
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