Posts Made By: John Holt

Consider the regular Starblast.
Rather than the EQ version.

There should be one on all focuser accessories including barlows, collimation tools, 1.25" adapters, focuser caps. Safety first!

More better yet, everything should _thread_ into the focuser. Yeah, that's the ticket.


Safety under cuts are right up there on my personal list of keano astro safety things, right next to hardwired headlights on cars.

One consideration is a permanent pier. Steel anchored in concrete. Positioned adjacent to any surface that the chair operator can navigate upon. Local welders would jump at the opportunity to help with the pier. It should have a vertical component combined with a horizontal component. And it should be over built.

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A scope with the shortest moment arm possible will yield the easiest eyepiece positions. Obvious choices are short tube fast refractors and newtonians. Barlows are our friends here. If the observer wishes for more focal length for solar system targets (and deep sky), then a Mak or SCT. Pocket sized budget wide field eyepieces will work really well with these longer focal ratio scopes. We have all over estimated on what weight scope we can handle. Pick an upper weight limit, and then aim for a mark safely below it. : )

The height of the pier will be determined by the length of the scope tube and focuser position. And the usual considerations that go with wheelchair operators.

The mount type.....well, I like alt-az mounts and atlases. But I'm not in a wheelchair and I observe from rural sky. With a permanent pier, digital encoders or goto should be a serious consideration. They can really simplify things.

Yes indeed! Good article.
The sweet spot in averted vision is real. Can't collimate my brain enuf to memorize object positions before going afield, so I bring charts. But very, very judicious use of the absolute dimmest possible light is critical. And still requires a wait for best perception to return after looking at the chart. There is a noticable lag time.

I own neither. However, a 32mm plossl is an ep that will perform well in about any scope of any focal ratio one will ever own. And Televue's is the state of the art.

That's not a recommendation. The QX is a 2" lower power that will yield a wider field.

http://www.cruxis.com/scope/scope1070.htm

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

Recently started watching the original series. Begun airing in 1959. What a hoot! What writing! Maybe not each and every episode, of course. But the overwhelming majority of them are very very good. And its a riot trying to figure out before the end credits, who is who among the stellar casts from early television. Great half hour short stories. Some of the best tv we have watched in years!

I've worked in both union and non union places. The folks running the companies with unions....are THE reason why they have the unions in the first place. There are some amazingly stupid business operators out there in the world.

I will add that the older I've gotten, the more respect I have for collective bargaining of employees. I have seen way, way more dollar loss due to the protected untouchable employee status caused by situations of nepotism, then were ever caused by organized labor.

I'm sorry, but what was President Obama's middle name again?