Posts Made By: Daniel Freas

Well today was going to be the day I finally spent my grant money from Sigma-Xi. Alas the company I intended to buy some of my equipment from is aparently no longer in business. Now I need help finding a company that sells something similar and is still in business.

I have already purchased a Starlight Express SXV M7 CCD Camera.

Now I'm looking for a flip mirror, filter wheel, and UBVRI filter set to go with it.

I found Murnaghan Instruments and had intended to buy the equipment from them since they had a "Filter wheel and close-coupled flip mirror ultra thin combo unit" that sold for $899.00 and a "Kron-Cousins Photometric set for CCD" that sold for $399.00. Unfortunately when the financial department called them to make the purchase they were told it was a small company that had since been driven out of business by their inability to compete with their larger competitors.

So fine -- I figured if they couldn't compete with their competitors then there must be plenty of other dealers out there with similar products. But my searching is not turning up much. Please help. I'm finding tons of sites about SBIG filter wheels and tons of other sites about RGB filters - I want neither of these. I just want a filter wheel (manual is fine, it need not be super fancy) with a flip mirror and a set of UVBRI filters. The only other requirements are that it must be compatable with the CCD camera I have already purchased and I would prefer it to be in the same price range as my original intended purchase (around $1300.00) since that is what I pitched to the financial department (they are supplying all of the funds neccessary beyond the grant I received for the project).

All help will be greatly appreciated...and the sooner I get it the better - I want to be done with the money side of this thing and get on to doing some photometry!

-Daniel Freas

Well from what I can figure so far the focal length on this lense is incredibly short, probably not even as long as the lense is wide so planetary viewing is right out. Maybe a good kick around scope for the moon would be possible though. I'm thinking about taking it apart and using the lenses separately instead of as an assembly.

I finally managed to disassemble this thing (riping off half a fingernail in the process) and found a whole bunch of lenses inside. One of the lenses seems to be a 90mm f/2.5 that would probably work in a copyscope type design.

Another one of the lenses is very odd and I'm hoping someone here on the forum can tell me what it is and what I can do with it. It's obviously two lenses that have been cemented together, one of the lenses is *extremely* concave to the point of resembling a soup bowl. Then the other lens fits against this one but has a flat side facing out. So as a whole one side of the pair is very concave and the other side is completely flat. Besides a paperweight what's this good for??

Wow! I usually just give shots of M1 a passing glance because they inevitably look like tiny fuzzballs no better than what I can see through the eyepiece but this shot has some great detail. Nice work!

---Daniel

I would agree with you for the most part, people that do that wether seller or buyer are annoying. I don't know if it's serious enough to gain them negative feedback though. Feedback really shouldn't be used as a form of punishment, it should be a way to look at a person's transaction history. If no transaction takes place there shouldn't be any feedback.

Maybe if a person agrees to buy something and then just stops emails a negative feedback would be appropriate since that person has cost you time and potential other sales of the item. As a whole though I see far too many cases of "this person didn't respond to my emails fast enough" in the lists of feedback and it seems rather petty and insignificant to me. Personally I always try to respond to every email within an hour or so of receiving it to avoid getting that sort of thing in my history but I'm sure plenty of people without a cable modem don't have the luxury of leaving their email open 24 hours a day.

My thoughts~
---Daniel

Let the people ask whatever they want for their scopes. All they're doing is asking, and if the price is too high they haven't hurt anything except perhaps to waste a bit of their own time. It doesn't cause you any pain to read an ad with a price that's too high so what does it matter?

---Daniel

If you're logged in you're able to modify the ads you've placed and then you can just put **SOLD** in the subject line.

The other option is to go ahead and delete the ad...the person can STILL rate you, all they have to do is click on "User Ratings" over there on the left of the screen and type in your name or email address and your ratings will come up along with a little link that allows them to rate you for each ad they've responded to.

---Daniel

I got a 3" piece of Baader material from Draco Productions not too long ago and built an off axis filter out of it and some cardboard and duct tape for my 8" dob. I don't have a full aperture filter to compare it to but I've been happy with the results. I can usually get about 120x with a 10mm plossl with good results but the jump from that eyepiece to my 6mm at 200x is a little too much, generally at that magnification the image gets a bit hard to focus and won't really get as sharp as I'd like.

That doesn't bother me at all though because from what I've observed the most interesting views are low magnification anyway. I generally use a 25mm plossl for most of my solar viewing and rarely even bother putting the 10mm in.

I would think the only benefit of the full aperture filter would be a gain in sharpness at higher magnifications in which case I see no point. Maybe there's more to it, so I'll watch this thread to see what people who have compared the two side by side say but on something as bright as the sun I can't imagine why anything more than 3 inches of aperture would be necessary. Plus it would seem to me that the larger aperture would make low magnification viewing a bit uncomfortable because of the increased brightness.

My thoughts~
---Daniel