GPS – A Darker View

Replacing the Celestron NextStar GPS Battery

When your Celestron GPS telescope will not get GPS fix for a long time, or the GPS will not work at all, it is time to replace the battery on the GPS receiver board. Another symtom is when the telescope may get a fix, but it is incorrect, the time or location no where close.

Celestron Telescope GPS Module — The Celestron GPS telescope GPS module with the original battery

Instructions for replacing the battery are posted elsewhere about the web. There are excellent instructions for battery replacement on the NexStar Resource Site. It was those instructions I was following when I was recently replacing the battery in our ‘scope.

The GPS board is found in the main section on the oldest telescopes, but located in the arm in later ‘scopes. Our is located in the arm, a small circuit card just under the inside plastic panel connected to an antenna by a cable. Simply remove the four screws holding the plastic panel and you have access. The antenna cable can be disconnected with some gentle tugging, two screws for the board, one more connector and the board comes out. The battery is found hidden on the underside of the PCB.

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On Time Again

So last month the observatory clocks decided is was 1995. A software bug interfered with proper decoding of the GPS time signal. For a few weeks we got by by kludging two of the old clocks together in a creative way to provide good time for the telescopes.

The new clocks are now fully online and operational. I ran one of the new time servers for a couple weeks while keeping the old time servers in place as a backup. These have now been removed, with a second new unit installed as an in-place spare.

Hopefully this will keep everything on-time for the foreseeable future. Two new precision clocks, Microsemi SyncServer S350’s, time accurate to microseconds.

Meantime there may be a fix for the old equipment, a new GPS module by Heol Design. We have one on order to try. It would be a shame to throw out these very nice clocks.

Observatory Clocks — Two new GPS time servers installed in the Keck 2 computer room

A GPS Observing Clock

For years, when observing, I found myself wanting a clock on my observing table when recording observations. I have used either a wrist watch or a cell phone, but looking at these was uncomfortable as these modern devices use bright backlit LCD displays, not a nice night-vision friendly red. The cell phone also has the additional problem of using up its battery quite quickly when out of range of a digital cell tower at some remote observing site. I needed a simple desk clock for my observing setup.

Accuracy was also a question, accurate time is always important when observing. Asteroid occultations, lunar and solar eclipses, iridium flares, twilight, jovian moon transits, the list of things where accurate time is useful is long in astronomy.

The Specs

Of course being a electrical engineer makes designing and building a clock a fairly trivial exercise. But why stop there? Why not build in a few extra features…

Use red 7-segment LED’s and build in some type of selectable dimming mechanism.
Why bother setting the clock each time you set it up? Make the clock self setting and very accurate.
Since the clock is accurate add a serial port to allow the clock to supply accurate time to a laptop when taking astrophotos.

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