Posts Made By: Jeff Polston

Has anyone seen this type of deformity on a dove before? This is one of two young (just out of the nest) doves I found on my deck a couple of weeks ago. Both birds had deformities on their head. I caught a glimpse of the mother and she looked okay, though I didn't get a very good look to be absolutely sure.

Just curious. We have lots of doves around the house and I've never seen anything like this.

Jeff
http://www.mindspring.com/~jeffpo

Notice anything different? Well, the mother bird that laid the 4 light blue eggs apparently hasn't noticed the slightly larger one that's white with brown spots. This is from a hanging plant on my parents front porch (Laurinburg, NC). I think the nest belongs to some type of common house sparrows (one of them has a reddish head and throat), but I have no idea who the intruder egg belongs too. I've seen this on the TV nature shows before, but this is the first time I've seen it in person.

He's not out of business, but instead is taking a "break".

Well, first off, the DEC was wrong. With the polar axis of your mount pointed toward the north celestial pole (i.e. near Polaris), the DEC should read 90 degrees.

Also, a division of every 3.3 degrees in DEC means your accuracy will really be limited. And as someone else said, once your DEC is set, it's pretty much locked down and never moved again.

I use the manual setting circles on my fork-mounted Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and can pretty much nail everything I go after. I'm not familiar with your mount, but it does sound like it has much smaller setting circles.

Take a look at this article I wrote and see if it helps at all:
http://www.mindspring.com/~jeffpo/settingc.htm

Good luck,

Jeff

Three avenues to remedy the situation:
1) go to darker skies. You'll be amazed at the difference.
2) borrow a friend's larger scope
3) start working on astrophotography.

Jeff
http://www.mindspring.com/~jeffpo

Yes, it does exist, and has been around for quite a while.

I've got a Vixen 80mm f/11.3:
http://www.mindspring.com/~jeffpo/vixen.jpg
There was also a 90mm version. And I think Orion made some and maybe Celestron. Meade? Haven't seen one with a 2" focuser. Most seem to be .965" and 1.25".

Mine is on an easy to use alt-azimuth mount with slow motion controls. It's my grab-n-go scope. Gives great views of the moon and planets. I've followed moon shadow transits across Jupiter and have easily picked up the Red Spot. It does a decent job on the brighter deep sky objects. If I were giving a recommendation, I'd say go with a 90mm like you suggest.

Jeff

Did you raise it to the "next level" (i.e. talk to a manager)?

I've gotten a lot out of Meade by being persistent, and in one case, going up the corporate ladder another step or two. I have a LX100, that is just like an LX200 with the exception that it isn't GOTO and has a tangent system for DEC. After having the scope a few years, I tried to get into photography and discovered the DEC movement was WAY too slow. Went a few rounds with customer service. Sent in the motor (checked out okay). Sent in the base (checked out okay). Even talked them into sending me the wiring schematics to see if I could "trick" it somehow. They were even going to provide a custom handcontrol that would work, except it too would have a couple of quirks. I was really impressed with the attempt at service, though it did go on for months and months.

I finally discovered it was a design issue. The LX100 DEC motor was identical to the LX200 DEC motor, so it thought it was powering a direct drive instead of a tangent arm. Through experiments, I proved that all I needed was the right fork assembly (which houses the DEC motor) of a LX200. My customer service rep did NOT want to do that. One excuse was that it wouldn't work. Another was that they didn't want a hybrid out there in the field (hybrid? apparently they don't visit many star parties!).

In the end, I eventually went a rung or two up the manager ladder (nicely and with respect) and got them to send it to me. I bolted it on, plugged it in, and it worked like a charm.

As for going to the manufacturing source, I once tried that on another product. Price was too high since I wasn't ordering 1000+ units.

Jeff
http://www.mindspring.com/~jeffpo