Posts Made By: Floyd Blue

Well, the Paracorr arrived in time to take it out tonight for the club star party. Nice, pristine and beautiful turn-table type with 1.25" adapter. This is total compression type rings on 2" and 1.25" EPs. Should be great. I will give my opinion later.
Now I will see what this 31mm Nagler can do in a fast scope! Been wanting one of these for a long time.
We are supposed to try out the new Burgess line of EPs, the 90° & 80° FOV models. One of our club members is doing beta testing for them and I am hoping to get to thoroughly check out the performance of these EPs.
Floyd

If they told you that you could get the Go-To later and then said it could not be purchased, then they have violated the contract with you on the sale. I would tell them that the purchase was based upon their telling you this and that you would like them to refund you money or let you exchange it (with a credit) for a scope that did have Go-To capability.
Floyd

Ok, I bought my new flat. Got a 1/14 wave Antares Pyrex with reported excellent RMS. Got a great deal on it (discounted Price,the rear edge was beveled because it had a small chip) the guy was very nice and cooperative.
Bought this one because the price was right and the quality was in line with the quality of the rest of the optics. It comes with a certificate for the Interferometer tests. Not sure if that really means anything.
I was told that it was unconditionally guaranteed to be what I wanted or my money would be cheerfully refunded! Can't ask for better than that.
Floyd

Can anyone interpret these test results into a real idea of the Strehl value or quality.
I see wave value in PV and RMS, but I also notice a bit of a low spot on one end of the mirror. I understand that this is a small area and depth is minimal. I just am not sure how to interpret the test results. the numbers seem to show a 1/13.3 wave PV and a 1/66 wave RMS. Is this correct or am I missing something?
Floyd

I will be sending out two 2.6" Elliptical Flats for re coating soon. They have lots of micro scratches from excessive cleaning and wear so they need to re coated to make them usable in my opinion.
What I would like is peoples opinion on whether to use a regular Protected Aluminum, Semi-Enhanced Aluminum or, Fully Enhanced Aluminum. The problem is this, PAL (89% Reflectivity) is half the cost of Fully Enhanced (96% Reflectivity) and the Semi-Enhanced (93% Reflectivity) is 50% more cost than Protected Aluminum.
So the thing is, would you be willing to pay more for a mirror re coated with a better coating or would you want a mirror that the cost was low? :S
I am just looking for ideas about this before I send them out.
Thanks,
Floyd

I got a chance to try out the Pentax 5mm XW last night in a 14.5" f/4.2 DOB. On the Cat's Eye Nebula, it beat the 5mm UO Ortho and 5mm Orion Ultrascopic by quite a margin in detail, brightness and contrast. It was crisp, contrasty, bright and showed fine details at 310x. The night was not the finest I have seen and there was a bit of light pollution. So this was to me a good test of the capabilities of this EP.
I would have to say that I have not yet looked through a better 5mm EP.
Floyd

Rick,
Thanks again for another nice article. Very informative and I did get something out of it.
So, you can do a Strehl on a flat as well? At least I got that impression.
If so, then I guess the flat that I posted the test on would be about a .991-.995 Strehl, better than I thought for sure.
Floyd

Well, I made up my mind to re coat with enhanced aluminum for the two elliptical flats that I have.
I plan on selling them, but if they did not sell then I wanted them to be coated with my choice of coatings instead of the cheaper Protected Aluminum that cost less.
Hopefully this was the right way to go.
Floyd

Posted this on the wrong forum, so I am posting it here.
Well, I made up my mind to re coat with enhanced aluminum for the two elliptical flats that I have.
I plan on selling them, but if they did not sell then I wanted them to be coated with my choice of coatings instead of the cheaper Protected Aluminum that cost less.
Hopefully this was the right way to go.
The cost difference was only $6.50 per mirror for 93-95% coatings over 89% Protected Aluminum, so what the heck.
Floyd

Well, I have replaced the secondary mirror with the Antares 1/14 wave unit I just received and took it out last night for a test. It is a 12.5" Truss DOB at f/4.8.
The scope is performing better with this mirror. I am getting textbook star diffraction rings and patterns.
It was able to do 650x on the moon with no degradation of image other than getting dimmer from magnification. 450x was brighter and had clear details as did 350x with even brighter images. So 52x-28x was very good on the moon.
The sky was not steady for the DSOs and light pollution is very bad in my back yard, so I did not see too many objects. I did get M3 though and I could resolve stars fairly well.
I will have to say that the new brighter, flatter mirror did seem to enhance the view and details. It also seemed to have a general brightening effect.
This mirror was the first that actually gave me proper diffraction rings both in and out! I never got the in focus rings to show very well before, which makes me think there has been a problem with the secondaries all along.
So, I am happy to say that the primary figure does indeed look good and I don't need to worry about having it re figured.
Now to figure out how to put out 90% of the lights in this part of town so I can view from my yard.
Floyd 8)