Astronomy Equipment
Telescopes, Pier, Light Box, Stool
In 1997 I purchased the telescope used in most of these astrophotos. It is a Meade 2080 LX-3 SCT (circa 1988). It has an eight inch aperture with a focal length of just over 2000 mm. Like many SCTs it is fork mounted. It has a crystal controlled Right Ascension motor and a manually controlled Declination motor for guiding. The Meade has a piggyback mount I have used for a guide scope, refractor, or camera.
Orion Short Tube 80 f/5 Wide Field Refractor.
Stellarvue Nighthawk 80/f6 Refractor.
Stellarvue Nighthawk 80/f6 Refractor.
LX3 OTA on LX200 mount
The Stellavue proved too heavy
for my balance kit and SCT drive. I "borrowed" the 2 inch focuser and installed it
on the much lighter Orion OTA. It fit fairly well, except the three mounting screws
were rotated 180 degrees! My old piggyback mount was not very solid so I made an
aluminum mounting bar. I added brackets to support the camera since even the larger
focuser sagged under the weight.
Pier with hooks for battery,
outlet for power, holder for observing list holder for DSC,
Stool with adjustable seat.
Light Pot for taking CCD flat images.
Light Box with white LEDs.
Wood and Aluminum wedge for ETX-90
I have the usual collection of accessories us SCT owners
feel we can't live without: Meade 6.3 and 3.3 focal reducers,
Lumicon UHC, O III, and H Beta filters, Telrad, 8*50 Finder, Orion
Offset Guider (never used), JMI MotoFocus, JMI NGC miniMAX
Digital Setting Circles, etc. I credit the DSCs with allowing
me to image galaxies I can't even find in the eyepiece. I
credit my homemade $45 pier with allowing me to set up
quickly, stay polar aligned for months, and provide places to
hang all the accessories. Since the pier is wood, it is
easy to add hooks and holes to hang controllers. When I've
tried to do astrophotography at remote dark sites I'm
awash in cables and hand controllers.
Click here for pier building instructions.
holder for hand controller, shelf for eyepieces, holder for MotoFocus.
I built a Dobsonian mount for the Celestron 114 HD from instructions on the web site below.
I added a hinged door on the top of the Tube Box to allow removing the OTA for use in the
equatorial mount. I discovered other benefits since the tube rotation and balance are
adjustable unlike some Dobs.
Click here for
Ray Cash's Dobsonian building instructions.
I don't know if it was the old foam, partially closed rear end, or
hotter bulbs but unlike Gerry I had a heat problem.
On my third time out the inner
circle of foam collapsed. Inspection revealed the heat shriveled the
Styrofoam causing the bulbs to fall out. I remade the Pot using newly
purchased precut inch thick circles (8 & 9 inch) of pale white (more
translucent looking) Styrofoam. I enlarged the air vents and will modify
my flat taking procedure to set up autograb first. Then I'll only power on
the Light Pot for the few minutes it takes to download a dozen or so flats.
The new foam passed far more light resulting in over exposure at fast
focal lengths even at the minimum 0.11 sec STE-7E shutter time. I made
a small change in the holiday light string so that it operates as one
string of 100 bulbs instead of two strings of 50. This reduced light
output by about 4:1 with a similar reduction in heat.