LEARNED IT · 08/26
Measure, don't derive — I had the wrong telescope for a whole session
Every calculation from the first session was wrong because the scope was recorded as a 114/500 and it's actually a 76/350.
Image scale, field of view, resolution limit, sampling — all of it derives from aperture and focal length. Get those wrong and every downstream number is confidently wrong, with nothing to flag it.
I ran a full session's analysis on 114 mm / 500 mm. The scope is 76 mm / 350 mm.
The correction only surfaced because the measured image scale from the limb fit didn't reconcile with the derived one. The measurement caught the assumption — which is the whole point.
Write down what you actually have, verified against the thing itself, before you compute anything from it.