Posts Made By: Floyd Blue

Hi all,
Well, I got out for the first time in a while and got the real first image with the new mount mods and the new ST2000xm with the Astrodon Gen-2 I-Series filters.
The night was not perfect, decent transparency with some high haze though. Seeing was about average and light pollution was typical for the site.
It came out fairly well and the Halos around stars were definitely gone! :^) That was the reason for buying the new Gen-3 filters, though the cost was much more, maybe it was worth it. Plus they are color balanced for my camera.
Hope you like it.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that have sold a lot of items for a lot of money and never paid a dime for support.
I have actually had them state that they do not fell they need to or should support, because the internet is a freebie. Now these people have never had a site or a server, you can be sure of that. :S

Well, I bought new Baader Narrow Band filters, replacing the Astronomiks. They are reported to not cause halos as do the Astronomiks and some other brands.
I also made a change in the line up. I got an HAlpha, HBeta and O-III this time, so the the HA is red, O-III green and HB is blue. This will allow me to use them for tri-color, true color images. The HB is a nice blue and should work well for this. The HA is a good red of course and the O-III is a blue-green and will work fine for the green band.
I did this because I just prefer the natural colors more than the palettes like the Hubble palette. I have seen some work done with this setup and it was quite nice.
The Baader filters are a tighter bandwidth too and should make for a better image, I hope.
Next time out I will probably give them a try.

I can not help but notice that gas prices are creeping up again. The price of oil is much lower than for the last 4 years and yet the price is about $2.35 a gallon again, when it was $1.50 a gallon with the price of oil even higher.
Seems to me we are still getting some kind of manipulation here.

I think that it is just silly to think that a mass produced scope made with just machines will produce as fine an instrument as one that has had time and expertise applied.

The type of glass is important to be sure, but more important is the skill that is applied to the glass and design.

One is just fooling themselves if they think they can buy a scope for 40-50% the cost and compare with the more expensive scope, providing of course that the cost is due to quality and excellence in manufacture.

There is always a chance that a small percentage of the mass produced scopes will come out rather nicely. But there is a very small percentage of chance that a quality scope will not be excellent. This is the way it really is in my opinion.

If you demand cheap prices and excellence, I think you are asking too much, because they do not go hand in hand.

Yes, it is too bad that the hand figured optics take so long and require so much time to make. This makes it hard to produce too many of them in a year and this causes long lines and waiting periods to obtain one. But I just don't see any way around it either.

Remember too that glass is only one component in the scope. The rest is also very important and expensive to manufacture when held to a degree of excellence. Something as simple as a focuser can be a major difference between one and another scope. Especially for imaging purposes, the focuser is a big concern. Plus the lens cell, which is overlooked so often, must be of the highest quality or else even the best of glass will not make a difference.

Scopes are a marriage of skill, design and materials and when the marriage is done properly, excellence and longevity is the result.

Let us just hope that this is not lost in the shuffle as manufacturers crank out the units with their mass production machines.

Got my S-II filter today, had to wait for it as it was back-ordered. Now I have the HA-HB-OIII-SII and a clear focusing filter, all the new Baadar 1.25".
Hopefully I will get a chance to try them out soon. This weekend is not looking good, but Friday is a maybe.
Figures that I would get skunked for the New Moon week and weekend. But I can get out with some Moon, so maybe next week?

I would like to have a longer focal length scope for some objects. I am currently using the NP101 non-is model and am wondering if I could use my "Big Barlow" with this scope for imaging with my ST2000xm. I think I can achieve focus, but have not tried to do so. But I am wondering if anyone has ever tried this?
Floyd

I have been looking at two scopes for imaging as a longer f/l to compliment my NP101.
The NP101 works great for wide field images, but I would like to have something that imaged at a higher res, image scale, and larger aperture to make that work better.
Looking at two alternatives;

1) 7.1" Mak/Cass f/6 which has high quality optics and designed as an Astrograph. This would give a flat, well corrected field, with a 1.4" image scale and 1080mm f/l. Well built unit with a fine ring set that would accept a guide scope and dove tail plate and a good finder scope. Cost $3250

2) 8" RC f/8 with optics that are Guan Sheng and certainly not as good as the Mak/Cass from what can be seen in optical tests done by Wolfgang.
Flat well corrected field with .95" image scale and 1600mm f/l. Comes with a Dovetail Plate but no rings for the guide scope or any method for attachment of one. But could probably come up with a solution. Has no finder, but a finder shoe is included. Two speed focuser, Crayford style, typical Chinese type. Cost $1400

Each of these scopes has its pluses and minuses and of course a huge cost difference. But, the real questions I have are,
1) Which would be the better Astrograph and produce the better images?
2) Would the larger aperture make up for the slower focal ratio and lessor optics?
3) Or would the smaller aperture with faster focal ratio and better optics prevail?

I would like your opinions on these and any other information you would like to add would also be appreciated.

It does seem that too many have been not paying their taxes.

Well, after so many nights of changing focus with temperature drops. I decided to by an Auto-Focuser.

There are a few available, some are generic so they fit many focusers and some specialized. I thought a while about what I wanted and decided to go for this one, because it is for the Feathertouch focusers and also for Tak focusers too.
It is a bit cheaper than the Feathertouch system, but uses the same motors. But, it uses USB instead of the old serial port and I figured this would be better. It also has a one piece integrated controller and hand pad, temperature with compensation and comes with FocusMax.

Now to learn to use the thing and get it all installed! Hopefully this will help with the task of keeping up with focus through the night. It will at least be more accurate and repeatable!