Posts Made By: Keith Garrett

I was taking pictures on dec 24th, and 5 of my images of m42 had a very slow moving object in them. Can anyone help ID what it may have been? The object was moving from right to left in the images.
Time: 10:00pm EST
Location : 43.608588, -71.276460
Exposure time : 114.6s

Any ideas? need more info? more exposures?

Thanks for any help;
Keith Garrett
Tuftonboro NH

Just wondering if anyone else from NH or Maine was willing to miss half the superbowl for a chance at a 424km shadow pass of the ISS to take place in Moultonboro NH sunday night at 10pm. If anyone else wants to freeze for that chance for a special photo, let me know!

Keith G
Wolfeboro NH

I am not sure where else to ask this, I have a nikon 17-55 f/2.8 lens, and I want to use it on my modded canon 450d for some wide sky photography. However, even when I set the aperture to f/2.8 on the nikon body and remove it, it closes the iris down to about nothing. I have no manual aperture ring like I do on my less expensive nikon lenses. Is there a way to keep the iris wide open, so that I can put it on my canon with my adapter ring? I can do this no problem with my other nikon lenses using the aperture ring setting. It took me several outings before I figured out why I had to expose forever when putting that lens on my canon body. My nikon has too much amp glow and still has the IR filter so it is of limited use for what I am trying.
Anyone know any way around this?

Regards
Keith Garrett
Wolfeboro NH

Three years after rescuing this scope from a dirt floor garage, where it was frozen into the floor, I have finished restoring it. This is a 10 " f/5.5 on a 1.5" shaft starliner mount. The original secondary had fallen off the spider and hit the center of the primary. The secondary had broken in half, and the primary had a nice scuff right in the center (luckily). The coatings were all but gone anyway. I sent the mirror off for an enhanced aluminum coating, and last week finally ordered a 1/20th 2.14 quartz secondary from ProtoStar. One of the tube rings was snapped, and I had that re-welded, straightened out the bent spider, replaced the starting capacitor on the RA ac motor- etc. The meade 80mm f/15 came with it, along with a unitron spotting scope.

I have never set up or used a reflector.

Today I installed the primary and secondary, and started to align everything. The Mirror is not centered in the tube quite perfectly. I have no centermark on the mirror either. I used an orion laser collimator to adjust everything so that the laser fires in the focuser, hits the secondary, primary, secondary again then back up to the collimator.

Is that the correct way to align it? I was reading a lot about having a secondary offset, and light cone positioning- what should I do next? how much does the centering of the primary cell matter? I pointed the thing out the window at a transformer about 500 yards away, and even through our snowstorm here in the northeast, I was able to very clearly read the small labels. What should I do next? I figure I have at least a week now before any clear skies!

Regards,
Keith G
Wolfeboro NH

bump

I was just going to post about this same topic..

The ISS will be doing two passes over me, one thrusday, and one saturday. I had the priveledge of spotting through my c80ed last year at this time, when I had no idea it would be flying over. I would want to attempt to take some photos of it. Does anyone have any pointers?

My equipment:
Celestron c80ed mounted on a meade 127ed, on an lxd 650 mount. I have 2 prime focus adapters and a projection adapter coming tomorrow. I was thinking about tracking it manually through the c80, and having a camera attached to my 127 using the projection adapter with a meade series 4000 plossl. The camera is a nikon d80, which hopefully i will have in focus.
My goal is at least one photo, with a bit of shape to it, instead of just a streak of white

Ideas welcome

Regards;
Keith G
Wolfeboro NH

Well, ISS just flew over. My first attempt at anything other than a few pics of the moon, taken with a meade 127ed at prime focus with a nikon D80. It was really hard to follow looking through the camera viewfinder, and my RA lock broke in the cold and was stuck half tightened. Blurry, but way better than I expected, seems I have never attempted this before.

Another picture with a c80ed for scale.

The ar5 is f/9 so the antares ota might be too short?

Just wanted to follow-up on this earlier post. I have fixed the motor drive on the star-liner mount, and decided to restore this scope.
Couple of quick questions:

The paint on the ota has stress cracks, how would I go about stripping and repainting, or having someone else do it?

The primary needs to be recoated, I could read forums and do my own research to find out who to use for that job- however I figure I would just ask!
Who would you use for mirror coating, and what kind of coating should I get?