Well I just got clouded out. But that's probably a good thing as I have a long day at the office tomorrow.
I spent most of tonight's session working on the RCX400's Periodic Error Correction (PEC). I had tried a few times recently to perform PEC training with the scope but kept getting errors, and apparently this is a common problem with these scopes. One solution seems to be to use a software program called "PEMPro" from CCDWare. So today I installed it. It took a long time and I'm not positive I got it all right, but after a bunch of setup, calibration, and a lengthy automatic series of about 700 CCD images the program produced a graph of the mount's PEC. I think the result was about a 12 arcsecond error without correction - which actually is not all that bad for an out-of-the-box telescope. I downloaded the correction data to the scope so hopefully it will greatly improve, which is important for obtaining quality CCD images.
So I thought perhaps I would give it a try by imaging M100 (where the SN2006X resides). Unfortunately the clouds had moved in so I ended up shutting down without taking any images.
I did get a chance to see Mercury naked-eye this evening, but didn't have time to set up the scope or take any pics. Mars was near the Pleiades and Saturn was practically in the Beehive Cluster when I observed them tonight. Actually they would have been more interesting through the binoculars.
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