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Posts Made By: Charles Hakes

September 13, 2004 01:01 PM Forum: Equipment Talk

meade dobs help!!/ allignment marker location?

Posted By Charles Hakes
If this is anything at all like the 8" version, I'm not sure what difference it makes. There are several 8" at the local college, and some have those red marks and some don't. I have done repairs on a couple of those scopes that required new thread inserts on the base, and that made no difference at all in scope operation. The only thing is that you might have to realign the mirror, which you would probably want to do anyway.

Charlie

September 23, 2004 12:06 PM Forum: Equipment Talk

Minimum aperture for globulars and galaxies?

Posted By Charles Hakes
Of course I like the views throught bigger scopes, but I am always very satisfied when I can find/see one of these things in binoculars. It is almost the most satisfying when things are just on the edge of visibility and you finally are sure you have found something.

Charlie

September 25, 2004 01:05 PM Forum: Equipment Talk

Wedge needed?

Posted By Charles Hakes
Good question. I had the same one recently. I'll let you know in a few weeks if I made the right decision. I recently ordered a field de-rotator for our 16" LX-200. It seemed like a less unwieldy solution than a wedge for that scope. I figured it should work, since all of the new huge telescopes (Keck etc.) are alt-az with some sort of field de-rotator. A wedge is the "classical" solution, however, and for a 10" scope that may indeed be the easy way to go.

Charlie

November 12, 2004 12:51 PM Forum: Equipment Talk

Inexpensive spotting scope recommendation

Posted By Charles Hakes
I haven't been impressed with any of the scopes at our local Big 5. Look at the 80mm from Apogee. I have a previous generation of that and I would have to count it as a best buy. They also show a smaller spotting scope on the same page, but I don't know anything about it.

Charlie

September 27, 2005 02:36 AM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Deep Sky

Need help with "Insert WCS/AutoAstrometry" in CCDS

Posted By Charles Hakes
I got this to work finally. Just lots of reading and a little tweaking of the Source Extraction Setup. Thanks for looking if you did.

later,
Charlie

July 18, 2006 02:59 AM Forum: Equipment Talk

Recommend light (~26oz) astro binoculars?

Posted By Charles Hakes
The Orion Ultraview 8x42 says it is only 27 oz. At $149, they are a bit cheaper than some of the others mentioned here. I have the 10x50s and really like them for the price. (Especially since I got them on sale.) Nice image, eye relief, and FOV. My brother-in-law has some of the 8x42s, but I have not used them for astro viewing, but for daytime they are nice. Those may be a good compromise vs. price.

Charlie

August 23, 2007 06:49 PM Forum: Equipment Talk

LX200 help wanted

Posted By Charles Hakes
I am sure I have been researching this issue more than most of you and I wanted to report success.

I searched the www and found several reports of the same symptoms, but all were slightly different solutions found. I will summarize the problems found by others as "something loose inside". So my fix could be characterized by "selected jiggling", which some of you would rightly find somewhat disconcerting. I disconnected most of the cables to the main internal board. Cleaned what I could reach. (The "mother board" in the base is appallingly insecure by design!) Put everything back together and "flexed" the main cable going from the control panel to the mother board. My guess is this last bit of flexing fixed the immediate problem. Only time will tell. Thanks for thinking about the problem if you did any of that.

Charlie

September 15, 2007 09:00 PM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Deep Sky

CCD Soft Workoflow

Posted By Charles Hakes
I wish I could find an easier way too. Unfortunately I have not been able to find one. It sounds like you are doing a good job by seperating the LRGB into different folders. It is what I end up doing - several modified, duplicate sets of folders along the way. Whenever I can, I do try to take pictures of the same time length so I can reuse darks. Most of my light frames tend to be shorter anyway, since I have a non-anti-blooming camera and don't want to get bleeding stars. That makes for lots of files, and if you know how I can reduce that number, let me know.

Charlie

October 18, 2007 02:23 AM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Deep Sky

Expanded spectrum on M16

Posted By Charles Hakes
Here is the dumbell with basically the same process. Took this the same night. About half the data though. Unfortunately much of the UV got hosed, so I scaled it extra and added the blue and UV together for the blue channel. The nebulosity has almost NO detectable IR. Interesting. There is, however, quite a bit in UV. And that white dwarf stands out a bit more than it usually would. If I can get some more UV data, it should be even more abrupt.

Charlie

October 30, 2007 12:04 PM Forum: CCD Imaging and Processing/Deep Sky

M42 processing question

Posted By Charles Hakes
I have seen lines like that when trying to align some dim subs in CCDSoft. For some reason the alignment gets totally out of whack on one or two subs. Sometimes I can definitely trace it to a stray hot pixel in the flaky frame, but other times I have no clue as to why it aligns poorly. And I can get things like that when only one or two subs are off (surprisingly few). If you look at the aligned subs individually you might see something. Good luck.

Charlie

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