Posts Made By: Bruce Mills

Hello All,
As I was passing by here again,a thought occurred to me about the PST everybody seems hot on.If the PST is around five hundred dollars,and the Solarmax 40 is nearly three times that cost(I think),and they're both 40mm aperture,and both ostensibly do the same job,what exactly are you paying for with the Solarmax?
It's an obvious question that has likely been answered a dozen times already in this forum,but I only look in here occasionally.
Another question.The smallest 'scope I have is a Sky90,were I to tread the HA path what would you get,having written out the 90 and 60mm filters on grounds of cost say.An SM40/BF and the little Tak.,an SM40'scope or a PST?
I admit these are idle but recurring thoughts which suggests to me I maybe working up to emptying my pockets again.
Cheers,

Bruce

Hi Vars,
You get that Meade filter I sold to you? :C
Bruce

Thanks for that too.A good read.
I was surprised to note how little notice George Galloway 'telling it like it is' attracted in the U.S..At least that's the impression our media suggested here in the U.K.
Galloway's no 'thug' either.He's an ex boxer who knows how to stand his ground,and appears to have principles,scruples and moral purpose,which,to both our countries shame are qualities manifestly lacking in our elected representatives.
I never thought I'd post anything in this hothouse forum of 'Politics' here on Astromart.Heck! 8O
Cheers to all,

Bruce

(My curiosity was piqued also not so long ago,and on the Coronado forum enquired as to the anomalous orange hued colouring of pretty much all their sun images,when the sun,plainly,is a lustrous scarlet visually.Greg Piepol replied that it was simply a matter of aesthetics and convention more or less.
I don't recall if I asked how such a convention developed,nor did I pursue the aesthetics question.
The orange colour is not an inescapable consequence of post processing,it can be any colour the processer desires.
It would be interesting to see a decently presented side by side comparison maybe.)

...I just pasted in a reply I made to a question about PST colouring in another forum on here.
I think I'm right on the basic facts I hope.
Still,would anybody care to bother creating a comparison? 8O

Bruce

...utterances.I know you all like a good read.I thought this may have been picked up by some of you,but I'd guess it would rank only as 'local news' for we Brit's.
I have to say,in large part,I agree with him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/05/wgall05.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/08/05/ixnewstop.html

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,15935,1543291,00.html

Bruce

Not sure whether to post here or in the Coronado section.Further,it's probably a well known phenomena with digital imaging,but,I'm just beginning to get into picture taking,so.."What the heck is responsible for the raster banding in a whole bunch of duff solar pic's I took a week or so ago?" :S
I mentioned the Coronado forum as I thought it may be an artefact of the etalon and I was seeing interference fringes perhaps. 8O
Taken with a 20D plugged into Coronado's Maxscope 40 <0.5 with a Powermate 2.5X,uncropped.
Cause?Cure?Any thoughts?

Bruce

A P.S. I edited for a resize as the original uncropped image didn't show the bands well.Now cropped and blown up a little.

Hello All,
Right. Near enough at the 'Last Chance Saloon'! Going global !
I got the the Tak. collimating eyepiece and crosshair tube set from OPT yesterday to try and finally collimate a new'ish ( under a year ) 2.8 ED180 that I bought 'used' a couple of months ago. It had a pedigree of taking several published pictures and I picked it up without having a peek through it and when, after arriving home that evening, I had a looksee, it was woeful. The stars were smeared right across the field. In fact unrecognizable as such. The seller naturally enough pleaded total innocence. No matter, I had all the right tools: crosshair sight tube, Cheshire, a couple of lasers ( one, a LaserMax ) and a modicum of common sense. I thought.
Every tool ended up contradicting each other of course. Outside, on the one mag.4 night that's happened since I got it I couldn't get it together at all. The upshot being that at the end of December I ordered the Tak. collimating kit from OPT. Yesterday: joy ! No slop or play at all. Although the instructions are in Japanese of course, the drawings follow the time honoured sequence of events to line everything up. And yet, how is it that when I put the corrector back in the focuser and look across the valley here to some leafless trees on the skyline, I get to see more or less what I saw before ? Aside from a bit of kidney beaning, one side of the image will be sharp'ish and the other hazy.( Using a succesion of Naglers and Pentax's. 1.25" ) And so on. I would suggest it still isn't close to being anywhere near lined up. Stars,(given the opportunity!) I feel sure will still display as streaks. I'm given to wonder why?
Here's a pic. I snapped an hour ago which approximates pretty closely what I'm seeing in the collimating routine : sky end to the right of picture, and crosshairs rotated to line up over the spider.
The question is: does anything jump out at you as an obvious malady?
Cheers,

Bruce

Does anyone know where the offset spot ought to lie upon the face of the secondary of the Epsilon 180 ED 2.8 ?
I might as well come clean and tell you all that, as I had the opportunity to take out the diagonal when the primary cell was taken out, ( see: "Collimation Woes" here ) it was an opportunity to give it a dust down and a clean. ( blower>sable brush>distilled water>isopropyl alchohol ) I imagine the collimating spot got lost when the diagonals' face was spray drenched with the alchohol to evaporate dry.
Truly spotless now. :S I might suppose now that it was probably only a felt tip spot to begin with.
Because of all the variables such as field width and f.l., as well as the ED corrector element I'm a little flummoxed about working it out for myself.
Still can't post on the the Tak.Uncensored site.
Cheers,

Bruce

Hello All,
A sort of update on getting the Epsilon I have back into shape. I hope.
I confess to still being a struggler with my Epsilon. I want to translate the collimation pages of the Tak.Epsilon 180 manual, which is full of really useful looking illustrations on the collimation sequence for my 'scope. There is also a lot of useful looking Japanese verbiage to go with the illustrations. The thing is: how do I get the relevant wordage from the printed page into an online translator, such as 'Google Language Tools' or 'Babel Fish' ? Which, I would hope, might give me the gist of what's in there. Is there a way?
Secondly, not in the 180 manual, but in the category of 'useful things to know for owners of the E-180'. I found out from Fred at TNR that the offset for the collimating spot on the secondary of the E-180 2.8 ED is 7.5mm away from the primary. The minor axis of which is 80mm and the major 113mm. Fred had to mail Tak.HQ to procure that gem. I'm grateful. ( if you read 'Collimation Woes' from earlier you may recall that the sec.spot melted away when I drizzled a wash of alcohol over the mirror as a final rinse in cleaning the al. coat)
I put the spot back OK a couple of days ago but am still toiling getting my head around the collimation. The odd thing is-to me- that out of about six or so fairly dense pages specific to the E-180 collimation routine it's only at the bottom of the fifth page that attention is given to the primary.
Cheers,

Bruce

Hi,
Well, the Tak. forum here didn't come up with anything so I'll try it out in this forum.( where else? )
I'm not at all sure this is feasible but,.. I'd like to translate the collimation pages of the Tak.Epsilon 180 manual, which is full of really useful looking illustrations on the collimation sequence for my 'scope. There is also a lot of useful looking Japanese verbiage to go with the illustrations. The thing is: how might I get the relevant wordage from the printed page into an online translator, such as 'Google Language Tools' or 'Babel Fish' ? Possible ? 8O Not possible ? :S

An aside:searching around for a forum to post this on it occurs to me that as so much of modern observing has its roots inside of a computer it's perhaps a little surprising that there isn't a 'computer forum' here on Astromart, to place and answer the questions of computer semi-literates like myself.
Cheers,

Bruce