Saturday, November 19, 2011

The Triangulum Galaxy

Borrowed Liz's camera again and took 1hr 14min of this galaxy. Screwed the flats up, tried to take them the next day, but didn't go so well...still my best galaxy so far.
M33

Monday, November 7, 2011

Mark's ETX-80 Telescope

11.08.11 -Update - picked up superglue and fixed the broken plastic part, just tested the scope with 2 star alignment, Jupiter was slightly off goto with a 20mm, slewed to Andromeda and it was in the eyepiece, slewed to the Ring and it was slightly out but found it easily. Rockin!
Mark let me borrow his Meade ETX-80 Refractor. After setting it up I realized something was wrong, the gears were being blocked somehow, the scope would only rotate so far, then it was running into an obstruction of some kind. Unfortunately the only way to find out what, was to open it. With owner permission I started disassembly. Not too bad, only one hidden tiny hex on the RA clutch lever. When I opened it I quickly noticed the worm gear was not right, it was loose, after further inspection I found a broken arm on the plastic assembly that holds the worm gear. The gear had fallen down slightly and was torqued slightly sideways, That was causing the 2 screws that mount the scope to the tripod to come in contact with the gear assembly. Wouldn't you know it I am out of superglue.
 The only thing I can figure is the scope was dropped or impacted hard enough to break the little plastic piece, or the RA was turned while the cluctch was locked.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Jupiter afocal 11.1.11

Seeing was pretty bad, tried using the 20mm Titan EP with 2x barlow lens screwed in barrel. Registax hung up many times trying to get the vids to stack, this was the best of 4.