Posts Made By: Mike Crews

So I was on the list way back in 1995 when it was somewhat shorter than it is now. Took delivery of my 155EDFS in 1996, total of 20 months waiting altogether. OK big deal, people are waiting longer than that now. Yeah, but that isn't my story.

My story is about delivery. The short version is: UPS left it on the porch. In the middle of Hollywood, California. In broad daylight. My porch was about 3 feet from the curb, on a busy street with lots of foot and vehicle traffic. The box had "Adult Signature Required" stickers all over it. Can you imagine what I thought when I came home from work to see my prize sitting there? I was so angry and yet I was happy, all at the same time. I can only guess that its size was all that was keeping someone from stealing it.

Needless to say, I have avoided UPS like the plague since then, and they still cannot be trusted to follow delivery instructions. Oh, I can laugh about it now, but it still frosts me when I think back to that day.

Bill Burnett at ITE has delivered me a new MK91 fresh off the boat from Russia. Made by "INTES PLUS" of Moscow, Russia, according to the quality certificate and warranty signed by Bill Burnett and Mike Palermiti. I had a Van Slyke focuser fitted to it, which you can see with some more snapshots at http://www.batch.com/mk91.html

I will be able to get a couple nights under the sky this week, so if the weather/air holds out I hope to be able to post something interesting about its performance.

Has anybody used these, looked through them, heard of them?

http://www.newcon-optik.com/sib16x50.html

They go for about $600 street, and are an all-mechanical design, like the Zeiss 12x60 beast. I have a hunch this is the same model as, or the descendent of, the Russian-made mechanical IS binocular reviewed by Sky&Tel (May 1998 or January 2000), along with the Canon 15x45 and the Fujinon Technostabi.

They weigh about 3 lbs., which is what the Canon 15x50 IS weighs when you add batteries.

Any other thoughts on IS binocs? I am also thinking of the Canon 12x36 IS on account of the lighter weight. Not sure I want to hold 3 lbs. stabilized or not... I have an ad on Astromart looking for a used IS set.

The image scale is too small, I need to about double my focal length. This was taken with a Intes PLUS MK91 9" f/13.6 Maksutov, operating at only about f/19 because I am still twiddling with my optical train. I need more space between my A-P Barcon lens cell and the camera... only getting about 1.3x coupld to a T-C thread adapter. But I digress.

I used a Supercircuits PC35C color 1/3" CCD camera, which has manual exposure/gain controls. I had the shutter speed set to 1/100 sec, and gain to auto. I used Registax to process 1000 frames to make this image, the best frames out of a segment of 1500 frames. I made a monochrome version and sharpened it in Maxim/CCD, then recombined it as the luminance channel in a LRGB stack with the color data. The PC35C has a low-light monochome mode (0.05 lux) which I will try using to collect luminance data next time, instead of faking it. Might make the C-ring show better.

I digitized the video live on site, no VCR or camcorder was used. I used the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge to do this, plugging it into my laptop's Firewire port. I saved the DV format video to an external firewire-attached HDD of 120Gb capacity. This gives me a ridiculous 15+ hours of recording time (snicker). The really nice thing about this setup is that I get 29.97 fps with no dropped frames. For fast-rotating objects like Jupiter, the more frames in a short while the better, so I am really pleased with how well the DV-Bridge performs.

I am converting my BORG 100ED to the 115mm tube and f/4 operation, for a portable wide field film photo setup. I am wondering if I couple it to a mount like the Takahashi P2Z, should I worry about guiding it at all? The 400mm focal length seems to be short enough not to worry about the 5 arc-sec P.E. of the P2Z mount, at least for film photography. Might not be critical enough for CCD imaging with a ST-10. Not that I am planning that now, but I might want to in the future. The EM-10 is another mount I am considering, and though it has 10 sec PE, it also has dual-axis guding capability, where the P2Z only tracks in R.A.

Is the Takahashi polar finder as good as everyone says it is? For film I would want to have alignment good enough for at least a half-hour tracking. For CCD probably a minute or two is adequate, I guess. Is the polar scope capable of this accuracy, or should I prepare to spend time drifting?

What do you all think?

I have a C5 f/6 telephoto, manufactured around 1978. It appears to have no anti-reflection coatings on the corrector at all; or if it had any, it has long since worn off. I can see bright, full-color reflections in it just like it was a plate glass window.

Is there some place that can apply coatings? Celestron says they only offer clean and collimate service.

BORG 45ED with 72mm Plossl.

Anybody have good things/horror stories to tell about any Astro Tour companies? I am trying to select one for the Venus Transit 2004. A 5-day trip to Mauritius by EclipseTours.com looks pretty enticing.... But I don't know anything about these tour organizers. Any advice?

It has very long eye relief.

As seen from Neptune:

http://www.shatters.net/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=Calculus&id=Transit_Saturn_Sun_From_Uranus_2669_string

Very cool! Maybe humans will have the ability to travel to Neptune and witness this transit by that time.