Posts Made By: rushby craig

I have a collection of eyepieces that are mostly Plossls at the longer focal lengths (32mm, 26mm, 15mm) and a 7mm Nagler and 5mm Radian at the shorter focal lengths.

I've had a Tak Fs-128 refractor (f/8.1) for about a year now, and am thinking about adding some Televue Naglers, Panoptics at the lower focal lengths. If some of you have the same or similar scope, I'd be interested in what you think would be a good set of low power eyepieces to go with this scope. My second scope is an 8" f/6 dob that I built--so the focal length is slightly longer but similar. I've read great things about a 31mm Nagler or 35mm Panoptic with the Tak. What about a 20mm Nagler as a companion? Other suggestions?

Saw this last night on the local news. Pretty cool. http://www.ksl.com/?sid=22987812&nid=148&title=steel-beams-and-a-giant-mirror-how-a-utahn-is-creating-a-galactic-first&s_cid=featured-2

Saw this on the local news last night. I don't know if Mike is a member here. http://www.ksl.com/?sid=22987812&nid=148&title=steel-beams-and-a-giant-mirror-how-a-utahn-is-creating-a-galactic-first&s_cid=featured-2

Now the second image

Another great shot!
Thanks for sharing.
I'll be happy if I can get some as nice as this.

Rushby

I'm feeling your pain!

I also notice that Registax runs really slow when I have more than 500-600 frames. When I step through the frames manually to select the ones I want, there is often a delay of 2-10 seconds while the hard drive is reading on each frame. It is painfully slow. Is this normal? Or do I have something configured wrong? When I have had the patience to get through it, it has taken me 2-3 hours to process a stack of 1200 frames. Doesn't that seem ridiculously long?

I'm running it on a P4 laptop @1.7 GHz, 1GB RAM. I can't believe that it is a lack of computer power.

Interesting...almost the same view that I had on Nov 10. Your's looks much better though. I'm trying to figure out how to improve mine. Not sure if problem is camera settings, focus, collimation or what.

8" f/6 Newt on GEM
3x televue barlow
Celestron NexImage
15 fps
800 of 1000 frames

Peter Morrison said:

Olympus Mons, Elysium Mons, Newton crater and the finger thingy. Not sure what that is called.

Details:
Taken 11/14/2005 @ 10:56pm PST, average seeing
10" Meade LX200 GPS Alt/Az,
3x TeleXtender, UV/IR block
Philips ToUcam Pro II
800+/1800

Peter

I've had nothing but horrendously bad experiences with Washington Mutual.

I had a mortgage with another bank that was acquired by WM. My mortgage was set up to have the payments automatically withdrawn from another account each month. When the changeover happened, I suddenly got a late mortgage payment notice from WM. It turned out that they had not automatically withdrawn as they were supposed to, and were assessing me a late fee. When I called them to let them know about their error, I got no apology and was told that it was my fault, because "I should have been monitoring the payment to make sure that it had been made on time". I finally, after much argument, got them to remove the late fee, and was told that everything was now straightened out. Well guess what the same thing happened two more consecutive months...again it was all my fault. Never one single apology.

Later when I refinanced my mortgage I found out from the title company that there were some fees that they should have paid to the county that weren't (and which I had been charged). I had to pay them myself in order to get the new mortgage completed. When I went back to WM to point this out and ask for reimbursement they essentially told me "tough luck". I appealed to the Branch manager and to corporate, but was blown off.

I have heard many similar stories from others that I know. My advice to anyone who is considering doing business with them is to RUN AWAY! They are the most crooked least customer friendly bank I have ever experienced. That's why I do business with a Credit Union now.

A couple of years ago I was in the same situation. I had an Orion 8" f6 mirror that I wanted to have re-figured and upgrade all of the mechanicals around it. I had Mark Harry do mine. It saved me some money vs a new mirror (I think he charged me $350 including shipping and re-coating). The specs reported to me by Mark were very good after he was done (1/16th wavefront error, Strehl ratio .9798, with the significant error being near the center where it is obscured by the secondary). My Orion mirror is plate glass instead of Pyrex, but Mark told me that performance wouldn't be noticably differrent in an 8" mirror.
The performance of the mirror is definitely better than before, and I've been satisfied. I haven't compared to similar mirrors from the other premium mirror makers though, so I can't comment on how it stacks up against samples of their work.