Posts Made By: Alex McConahay

THese are 1.25 eyepieces with a convenient and permanently installed two inch adapter. THey perform just like a 1.25 eyepiece should, and get no optical benefit from the two inch adapter. To use them, just unscrew the screw that gets in the way of the focuser tube.

By the way, don't disassemble and remove one of the sizes of tube--you will find them useful at different times with different scopes. And neither really interferes with the other.

And if you think this is a dumb question, just realize that it has been asked many times before, (even on this forum in the last couple of months......I used to ask this same question.

Alex

Thanks for the warning on that stuff.

So would you say that stuff is better or worse than the side effects of the pizza?

I know my eyes get big when I see a good pizza, and my mouth starts watering. Sometimes my mouth gets burned. I almost always overdose on the stuff, to the point of gastric distress. And, depending on whether my wife is around and sees me eating it, I get an obsession about guilt.

You still think the eye stuff has worse side effects?

Alex

Try listening really hard to John Lennon's "Imagine."

Alex

I bought the same at Fry's electronics (SOuthern California, I don't know if it is elsewhere.) For (sorry, and I'm doing this in the interest of saving other people money) $69.99 on sale today--regular $129.

Sunspotters are harder to make than they look, but if you are handy, you should be able to make one. I never have, but studied a few real hard to learn their secets. What I plan to do is the following:

Disassemble a department Store Refractor
Find a few good flats (maybe parts of an old diagonal).
Get a good medium focal length eyepiece without too many elements.
Build a frame that can be pointed as needed. Make sure you have a way to adjust the eyepiece up or down between the last reflection and the viewing screen (a reflective surface). (The length of the lights travel from the lens to the first reflection, to the second (and third, if you like), and the eyepiece should be as long as the original tube of the refractor)
Mount the optics (diagonals, etc.) all in the right place so that they bounce the light where it belongs, then through the eyepiece, and down to a clean white surface.

Of course, this is all theory. I have not actually built it.

Alex

If you gave me a choice between

Mediocre Optics and great seeing conditions.

or

Great Optics and Mediocre seeing conditions.

I think I would take the Mediocre Optics in great seeing conditions, just because those seeing conditions are relatively rare. Of course, by mediocre, I mean "what you can expect to get from a mass manufacturer." It is hard to tell what one means by "mediocre," and you did not say "sub-par." I consider mediocre as "just average."

Alex

Bart,

Anybody who took on grinding a mirror should have the patience and personality to make a good dob mount for it. I don't think you should go anywhere else but to yourself to make the conversion.

The easiest conversion would be a square box whose inside diameter was the outside diameter of your current tube. Put a couple of bearings on the outside of that box, and the tube inside. Make a rocker box with trunions, and an azimuth bearing, and you will have your dob.

And, I would not go to a truss tube. The only two advantage of a truss tube over a solid are the open air--which could help cooling, and the portability.

As for open air, a better way, overall, is to install a fan (which would probably be a good idea on a truss tube anyway).

As for portability, that means really transportability, not just what car it will fit in, and so forth. A 10 inch F4.5 just does not take up enough room to change over to a truss tube--which would then require tight fittings, a lot of machining, repeatability in setup, and more collimation. You would spend less time transporting a tube than a truss telescope. You just don't have a big enough scope there to need truss tubes.

Alex

Did you scan a print or a negative or slide?

How does your scan compare with your original? If your original was a print, and this matches the print, then you need to go back to the place that printed them, and tell them that you do not want the sky balanced for daylkight, but for nighttime. (Actually, unless you had it done at a professional place, do not go back in there and thell them that, they will not know what you mean.)

Alex

Floyd,

Try here:

http://www.rivastro.org/rasddr2.htm

That is Bill's website.

By the way, don't you live in the high desert (of California)? Bill often takes his DobDriver on his homemade 18 incher out to Landers--you could see it in action there.

Alex

This is a good scope. As for what you should pay for it, just check out the ads. It is curious that you could probably get almost as much for the mirror and secondary as you can for the whole thing put together. The mount is usable for visual, although a bit awkward.

I have one of these. I sold the mount (About $225, it was years ago, and I felt satisfied to get that). And still use the wonderful optics in the not so hot tube on my G-11 for astrophotography.

Alex