Posts Made By: Alex McConahay

You know the old saying--"The only dumb question is the one that isn't asked." Well, maybe the second dumbest is "The one that takes a year to ask."

Smile, though, if you go to the Equipment Forum (where there is lots more traffic) and say "Where can I find an astronomy club near ________?" and fill in the blank with where you live, you will undoubtedly quickly find a club with somebody who will sit with you for an evening or two and show you how to make your scope dance.

You can also go to Sky and Tels website, particularly

http://skyandtelescope.com/resources/organizations/default.asp

to find a club near you.

Alex

Have you tried "Cartes du Ciel?" Google that.

Alex

Others have suggested the right way to do it. (My favorite choice is moving the pads further out.)

However, one other suggestion, is to wrap some clean masking tape over the teflon, or electrical tape. See how the added friction helps. If you don't like it, take it off.

Alex

I saw an interesting book the other day--If I recall correctly, the book is a couple of hundred pages long. It was an atlas of M31. If they can make an atlas of it, I know they can resolve it.

Now, is your real question: when will we be resolving it in our backyard scopes and imaging it with our webcams?

Alex

Darrell,

Assuming you are referring to the secondary focuser Meade sticks on the back of their LX series, I have to ask: How much travel did you expect?

Remember, the microfocuser is not your main focuser. You focus with the big focuser, just as SCT's commonly do. Then you adjust that with the electric focuser. It does not need much in the way of travel.

Alex

John,

I cannot quite tell what your problem is.

Are you using a laser to do this?

Starting back at the part of your post when you said, "Collimated the diagonal." What do you mean by this? Collimating the diagonal is the procedure that puts the center dot in the center of the secondary. The reasons this may not work is that the primary mirror cell itself is off center. (or the mirror is off center in the cell.)

When are you running out of screw travel? Theoretically, you can never run out of screw travel because, if you do, you just back the other two screws the other way.

And, by the way, you should collimate, whenever possible, with your screws as short at they reasonably can be (the back of the mirror is closer to the mirror cell). (This is not that big a deal with smaller mirrors, and you must consider the focuser travel when doing this.)

Write back with more details.

Alex

It does not really matter if you are willing to go only 45 minutes. (I mean, if nothing else, it can take 45 minutes to get out of Pasadena some days!!!)

If you are talking about observing from your backyard, just learn to enjoy selenography, or solar and planetery studies, maybe asteroid rotation studies (with a short exposure ccd camera) or spectroscopy or splitting doubles. (Not to say you cannot see deep sky things, they just aren't real satisfying.)

If you are looking for a home base to go travelling, you will need, I think, to get east of the mountains behind Big Bear, and hope for clouds over the LA Basin. You are talking about three hour drive. (Come join the Riverside Astronomical Society at our deep sky site near here. See Rivastro.org.)

I would avoid the beach (although you can do a lot of planetary, lunar, etc from there) because of the late night and early morning low clouds and fog.

The mountains are good--after all, one of the great observatories of the world sits 4000 feet above, and three miles north of Pasadena. And it is still hard at work even under the LA light dome. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of housing in that part of the Angeles National Forest.

The high desert, north of the mountains, is not exactly dark.

Sorry to be so glum--but you know there are thirteen million people within an hour of Pasadena. It is difficult to find a dark site!

By the way, I live in Moreno Valley, an hour east of Pasadena--Three hours east on a Friday afternoon--and have seen the little dipper and Andromeda galaxy from my backyard naked eye--maybe once or twice. In other words--you would have to go a long way to get out from the light dome.

Alex

Why would you want to use a filter? It would seem you would be better off just using a shorter exposure. After all, would that not help with seeing?

Alex

At the last "Meet at the flagpole" (For those not familiar, once a year, high school students are encouraged to meet at the flagpole in front of their school, and pray) the theme was "Support our troops."

I wonder what would have happened if I had gone out there and said something to the effect of "Oh Lord, I ask that you keep our troops safe, and bring them back home alive, and stop the senseless war that has seen so many of your children die, and protect the women, children, and men who are dying in Iraq because of this war, even those who are not American, and are "only" Moslems, and not Christians." (The "only" is in quotes for emphasis because in this kind of forum italics do not necessarily come out. No disrespect is intended.)

Would I have been criticized? Would I have been praised? I feel I would have been poorly received.

In my mind, "Support Our Troops" has come to mean "Support the War, even if you do not agree with it."

I never got into the original problem, which was very real, very harmful, and unfair in the Vietnam era. The troops were treated without respect. "Baby Killers" and other invectives were hurled at them. ON their return they were spat upon. There is no way that should have happened. However, had it not, that war might have gone on forever.

If you were drafted, and forced to fight in Vietnam, were you wrong to kill whatever you found in your sites? That was a long time ago. Let's not fight that battle over again.

Support our troops is a way to get people to support the war even though they do not support it.

Alex

This is almnost a duplicate of a question I asked a couple of months back.

And the answer then was--nope! Unless you want to disassemble the scope and do some machine work. (I understand the work itself is not that challenging, but that there are some risks involved and that it is not a sure cure.)

On the Meade there is a shipping screw that can be used to lock the mirror down. And on the new Meades this has been standardized so you are expected to do so and use the micro focuser. I am telling you this because so many people told me that when I was asking the same question a while back. I don't know what it had to do with my C9.25--but they all felt the need to tell me!

By the way, I visited at last year's RTMC with Celestron, and several very experienced astrophotographers, and they told me the same thing.

I never found a good alternative to the off axis guider. (And I've never found an off axis guider that I preferred to a separate guidescope....except for the image shift.)

Alex