Hardware
The telescope, the mount, the camera and everything bolted to them. Oldest first, so it reads from the first try to the latest.
First light: the Ring and the Dumbbell
The telescope's first evening out, a knock against its own handset, and two planetary nebulae before midnight.
Claude, you are hooked up to a telescope
I bought a motorised mount, put a laptop outside beside it and told an AI to drive it. By midnight it had found the Ring Nebula.
A motor focuser for £30
A small stepper motor, an Arduino Nano and a printed bracket now turn the focuser from the laptop. Getting the shafts in line was the hard part.
Andromeda from both sides of the sky, the Pleiades and Saturn
The polar alignment I thought was 0.2 degrees was really 3, the camera's short exposures got fixed, and an hour and a half of Andromeda came out of two runs stitched across the meridian.
Mapping the garden, and finding home
The telescope measured my garden's skyline by itself before dark, the true home position turned out to be ten degrees from where I had been setting it, Tabby's star got its first night, and then the camera started misbehaving and a neighbour's bonfire finished the night.