Posts Made By: Joe Baldwin

I was wondering if you ( or anyone else) has had the same problems with their Antares finder. I recently bought a 10X50 right angle finder with the dovetail base and I am very disappointed overall with it. First, there is a huge amount of parallax. I can move my head around and the crosshairs move w.r.t the field almost 1/8 of the field!. Secondly, the reticle eyepiece will not reach focus when fully inserted. It must be pulled back out a few millimeters to reach focus. I think this might explain problem #1. Lastly, and most frustrating, I bought the dovetail mount for my C8. The thing was so poorly designed that there is almost 1/2 degree of slop in the mount when the set screw is tightened. DO I just have a lemon or is this what you get for $140?

To all who responded, thanks. Based on Mike Hosea's excellent suggestions, I played with the Antares finder eyepiece and made a substantial discovery. The ring containing the crosshairs was threaded into the end of the eyepiece barrel. As the dipoter ring was turned to focus, the lenses actually moved away from the crosshairs causing the crosshairs to be out of focus for all but the closest configuration. I removed the crosshair ring, dissassembled the eyepiece and replaced the crosshair ring into the lens assembly ( there are just enough threads showing to do this). The cross hairs are now a constant distance away from the optical elements so they are always in focus as they should be. I can now bring objects at infinity into focus without sliding out the eyepiece and the image and the crosshairs are both in focus and therefore No parralax. The down side is that the corsshairs rotate when the dipoter adjustment is rotated If anybody has the Antares finder that is working properly could you possibly confirm that the cross hairs should be mated to the lens cell and not the bottom threads of the eyepiece?

Thanks

Cloudy skies parted 15 min before the scheduled pass of the International Space Station as predicted by heavens-above website. As the station cleared about 20 deg. elevation, a second bright object came into view on exactly the same heading about 20-30deg behind; it was the shuttle! The space station was predicted at mag -1.0 but it looked much brighter possibly due to the addition of the new truss segment. The shuttle was probably as bright as mag. 0 but it was always a magnitude or so dimmer than the ISS. They had parted earlier in the day and were still on the same orbital path ( visually).

Another pass for the central and eastern US is possible tonight but the shuttle is scheduled for a manuevering burn at 4:30pm today so that may change


Anybody else see this one?

Anyone know of an image processing package that will improve images blurred due to motion? I'm trying to recover some information from old 35mm negatives that were erroneously trailed. I know there is some prior art in that area but I haven't found any software with a canned routine. Thanks

Anybody got one yet? How do they perform?

Anybody tried modifying one of these for manual gain control and/or long exposure?

C9.25, 2.5x powermate, color video camera to Digital Camcorder. Registax X100 frames

mars in near infrared

Pulnix monochrome video camera with Near IR bandpass filter 800nm-900nm

Need to align RGB planetary image set. I can't figure out how to register them in Paint Shop Pro and IRIS wont save color image. APIWIN4 seems to be on crack when I select color processing.

Any suggestions?

Looking for a computer to run a USB toUcam and the usual viewing and stacking software. What is the minimum cpu speed, drive capacity etc. for reasonable performance?

Would A 233Mhz, PII work or do I need something nearer a 1GHz PIII

Thanks