Scattered Thoughts . . .

After I finished converting my old EXOS2-GoTo tracking mount into a fully manual mount, I went outside to check on the gardens around the house.  I noticed that the moon was in the sky!  I don't remember the last time I saw the moon in the sky and I know I haven't observed the moon through any of my telescopes since last fall.  I decided to head back inside to grab one of my grab-and-go telescopes...  a small telescope on a lightweight tripod.   This particular telescope is a Skywatcher 72mm ED refractor.  It is small and lightweight but has excellent optics.  I often use this same telescope for solar astronomy.  One of these nights, if we ever have a clear night when I am feeling well enough, I hope to do some nighttime imaging with it too.   When I stepped outside with the telescope, the first thing I noticed was a bird up high in a nearby tree so I pointed the telescope at this bird....  it was a dove and the view of this bi...

M y slow motion control knobs arrived this morning.  I quickly pulled the gears off each axis of my old mount and installed these new knobs in place of the gears.  I had been, very briefly, using the old gears as slow motion control knobs until these new knobs arrived.  These new knobs make it very easy to slowly track astronomical objects manually as the objects slowly drift across the sky.  Well...  really, the Earth is rotating and the astronomical objects are stationary by comparison but they appear to drift across the sky in an arcing pattern.   The upper photo shows the Declination axis while the lower photo shows the Right Ascension axis.  These knobs are just the right size for easy fingertip control of slow tracking.   Here, below, is a photo of the Declination axis gear that I removed this morning.  The gear shaft is a standard 1/4" shaft so finding nice knobs to the replace the gears was very easy.  For a short while...

Old mount on top, new mount at bottom. I already wrote about my problems with my old primary telescope mount so I won't get into the specific issues I have been experiencing with that old mount here in this blog entry.  A couple of days ago, I was able to take the new mount out for a spin out under the sky for a bit of visual solar astronomy and I was very pleased.  This new mount is simply incredible by comparison and is a tremendous upgrade from the old mount!  It worked exactly as it should from start to finish.  There were no unpleasant surprises nor any frustrations with the mount itself whatsoever.   Whenever I used my old mount, my focus seemed to be more on the mount and its quirkiness rather than the object I was trying to view or image.  These quirky traits could easily be justified as truly being faults and poorly written code.  The term quirkiness is just a bit kinder and gentler.  Really though, that old mount has always had ma...

I n order to convert my old GoTo telescope mount into a fully manual mount, I had to disassemble all the parts that made this mount a GoTo tracking mount.  This allowed me to more closely inspect these parts.  Mostly, this close inspection was simply out of curiosity but I also wanted to know what part(s) failed so I can help others who have this mount and encounter similar problems.   Disassembling the motor housings was the first problem (pictured at right).  It seemed that the screws holding the clamshell motor housings together were stripped.  I could not get a screwdriver to fit well enough so I could make any headway in removing these eight screws. Note:   I've since decided that the screw heads were not actually stripped.  I believe they were either screwed in too tightly or some sort of glue like Loctite was used to keep these screws firmly in place.  Instead, I decided to just remove the housings as a whole.  Once I had the...