Posts Made By: Stephen Fugardi

Taylor, Looks like you may have caught the "yellowish looking" sand storm on the image. It would be great to see that 16" with a 3x or 5x barlow! thanks for posting

Regards,
Steve

Paul, Congradulations! What kind of camera setup did you use to take 400 shots in rapid succession? I tried imaging the moons afocally with my digital camera, without success. Exposure times greater than 1 sec seemed to blur Mars severely yet not pick up any moons. I was thinking of trying to "hide" Mars outside the eyepiece field of view to cut down on the glare.

Regards,
Steve

Chris,

Your latest Mars shot is excellent! I was wondering about your experience on Oct 10 when you attempted to "collimate" the C11 while viewing Mars on the video. Did the focus shift greatly with collimation tweaks?

I tried the same thing as an experiment and found the focus blurred significantly everytime I tweaked a collimation knob as little as 1/12 ish of a turn. For the first time I fully appreciated the strong relationship between collimation and sharp focus. My attempts to star collimate using stacked barlows on an unsteady night proved worthless. Until I can figure out the collimation, I cannot visually view Mars with the 2.5x barlow, imaging with the Toucam and barlow do not produce sharp results for me. I look forward to hearing your opinions. Thanks

Regards,
Steve

Just to see, I tried to afocally capture the airy pattern at f25, however, the probability of capturing a cleanly focused shot through the turbulence was slim. Here's the best one of 10 attempts. In my opinion, the web cam method is better since it averages 200 shots.

Regards,
Steve

Folks, While the artifical star helped me obtain near perfect collimation in the horizontal direction, the gravitational forces on my optics required additional fine tuning when trying to view Mars/Saturn. My optical sag was a result of improper installation of the focuser. Once it was installed square to the visual back, there was no need for the rubber band slingshot thing. I did visually move the focuser up, down, left, right and the dount in the eyepiece did not appear much different but it did move accordingly. I was also surprised to find the polar alignment difficult recovering from my horizontal collimation work.

I used my 2nd alignment star, Aldebaran, for collimation (but actually it was too bright), then checked Mars. Although it was too low in the sky, I was able to resolve hints of detail using the barlow which I couldn't before. I then slewed to Saturn and was impressed with the view of the rings and at least 6 mooons. I took a webcam video and attached the best stacking of 300shots taken at 1/25sec. I believe the collimation can be improved further due to the "washout" in the rings.

In the end, the artifical star helped me learn how to collimate, but I'd say there's no replacement for true "in sky" collimation.

Regards,
Steve

Taha,

Try this link for tons of info, http://obs.nineplanets.org/obs/obslist.html
Your big 14" scope may need a 10'DIA dome. I've got an 11" inside a 7' DIA dome and its a bit snug. Sometimes you can get lucky and find a used dome in the astromart classified. I was fortunate enough to find one. There's also great info in this forum archived. Good luck!

Regards,
Steve

Chris, your collimation, camera setup and perfect seeing conditions are as close to ideal as anyone can expect to achieve. And it shows in the incredible quality of your images. Please keep posting, I always look forward to checking out your latest shots. At this point, I'd settle for just "average" seeing at least a couple of times a month...

Regards,
Steve

Bob, your dome frame looks professional, you must have a ton of hours in this so far. When trying to exactly matchup the wall "top ring" with the under side of the dome, I had good luck flipping the dome upside down. Also consider a good overlap to keep the rain out - I only went 1 1/2" using bondo and some rain still gets in. Good luck and keep posting your progress.

Regards,
Steve

Ed, congradulations on your new camera! Excellent Saturn shot. To get 4500 quality frames, that DMK camera must really be efficient. You must also have a super fast computer to process all the Gig's of data! Mine bogs down with 2000 frames... thanks for posting - can't wait to see your upcoming shots of Jupiter

Regards,
Steve

Bob, My 7' dome has its pier exactly centered for my C11 and the space inside seems fine. When I was contemplating this same issue 2 years ago, my tripod was broken so I was afraid to "estimate" how to offset the pier and just played it safe. Since your dome is even bigger, I would personally just leave it centered. To protect the observatory walls add an extra 6" radius and make the concrete pad 9'DIA. By the way, drill the bolt supports last, I added them first which may the job much more difficult. Good luck!

Regards,
Steve