Posts Made By: Charles Hakes

Last night about 9:40 the City Council passed an Outdoor Lighting Ordinance for Durango, Colorado! The best part is the city's commitment to retrofit all of the street lights and decorative "acorn" fixtures over the next seven years. Great!

Charlie

I thought more forum members would have wanted to do this, but I realise now that no Celestron or Meade owner wants to admit to what their image shift during focusing really is. So I have collected my own statistics on a few scopes and thought I had better report them. (These all happen to be Celestrons this time.)

My procedure was to look at high power at an antenna several miles away during daylight. The width of the antenna is about 45 arc seconds. (If I can ever find the reticle eyepiece that is around here I can get a better width measurment.) Suggestions for improvements are welcome. Here are my results:

Celestron (8" Orange tube on pier) Very close to 45 second shift. But very smooth, repeatable focus. Maybe collimation was better on this scope, or the pier added extra stability, but it seemed to "snap" into focus the easiest.

Celestron (8" Orange tube on tripod) Approximately 15 second shift. (Much harder to measure on tripod. Maybe I can repeat on a pier?)

Celestron (5" Orange tube) Approximately 5 seconds. This is getting down to the level where you might want to say "zero shift", but I would rather report anything as "less than X" where X is just the smallest angle I could reliably measure.

Celestron (5" Nextar new) Less than 5 seconds. This looks like the best, but I thought there was a peculiar "spring" in the focus that caused it to deflect ~10-15 seconds before snapping backto where it was. This went in both directions. This was the hardest to measure, because that tripod that came with the Nextar is next to worthless at over 200x. In either case, I much preferred the "action" on the older focuser.

SCT owners - please post more results.

Thanks,
Charlie

Does anyone have/use a CCD camera from SpectraSource Instruments? I am looking for any information on getting an HPC-1 up and running.

Thanks,
Charlie

I got to try this filter out last night for the first time. I put it in front of a 2" Everbright diagonal and used an 8mm Radian (150x - diagonal and eyepiece both also new) for comparing views of Jupiter and the double double through a 5" Meade acromat. There was a greenish tint to everything, which I had expected because I had looked through a similar filter before. But no purple haze. It did what I wanted, by bringing out much more detail in Jupiter, and making it much easier to resolve the double double. (While I could resolve them without the filter, there were several more inexperienced observers with me who could not resolve without the filter.) The plan now is to just leave the filter in all the time.

So how much improvement was from the new diagonal? I didn't look for that. Now I would like to compare Jupiter side by side with a 4" APO.

Charlie

Does anyone have/use a CCD camera from SpectraSource Instruments? I am looking for any information on getting an HPC-1 up and running. I put this in equipment talk also, but haven't got a response there yet.

Thanks,
Charlie

I want to get a rear crayford type electronic focuser for a 16" LX200. I would like to eventually get the scope under remote control. Which brands should I be considering? I see that Meade has something, as does JMI. The JMI has a fancy digital readout. Is that useful? I hear good things about feathertouch, but can they be remotely operated?

One other thing to consider is I also want to get the Meade field de-rotator to do Alt-Az astrophotography. I assume that would go on the scope first, but will the order make a difference? Has anyone ever extended the forks for clearance? If I add de-rotator, focuser, filter wheel, camera, how could it possibly fit?

Thanks,
Charlie

There are sure some great pictures posted here. My question is - does anyone use a field de-rotator and have their scope is alt-az mode when turning out these pictures? Keeping our LX200 in alt az sure would be simpler. That is, if those Meade attachments really work.

Thanks for any help or comments.

Charlie

Does anyone use one of these devices to close a dome remotely when the power goes off? Does anyone else worry about such contingencies?

Thanks for any comments,
Charlie

I asked this on the home observatory forum, but since there is lots more message traffic here...

Does anyone use one of these devices to close a dome remotely when the power goes off? Does anyone else worry about such contingencies?

Thanks for any comments,
Charlie

We finally go the ST-10 up and running. Since M13 appears to be a popular target this week it was one of the first tries with the new camera. (This looks like the worst M13 image I have seen this week, but since it is really our first image like this, and since I was the one sitting there getting cold, I still like it.) This shot was a “track and accumulate” of 10x30secs (300 seconds total) on a Meade 16” @ f6.3, with “medium” camera resolution. I used a dark frame frequency of “2”, (just trying different things) so I guess that takes one dark every other light. (I also took a color set one at a time, but there is a lot I want to try before I post that combination for questions.) Besides spending some more time focusing, what are some processing things I could do to help get our pictures looking better? Thanks for any help and comments.

Charlie