Scattered Thoughts . . .

E ven though my health has been miserable for the past week (I'll write more about that in other blog entries) , I happened to have enough energy the other day to take the old converted telescope mount out for a test run again.  I started with viewing the moon and our daytime sky.  The slow motion controls are smoooooth.  It appears as though this old mount's new life will work out just fine.   I brought out a nice selection of eyepieces on this day so I was able to test the manual slow motion controls for low power observing as well as high power observing.  The slow motion controls on this old mount worked very well. After viewing the moon for a bit using a number of different eyepieces, I turned my attention to the sun.  This meant a change in location since I had been viewing the moon in the shade.  I needed to move into the sun if I was going to view the sun.  This also meant a change in some of the gear I was using.  For starters, I would need the appropriate solar filter

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 many frustrating faults most of which I di

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 housings off the mount with the motors and electr

I finished my homemade telescope pier extension project today and it seems to be working as planned. There isn't a whole lot in life that is more satisfying than designing something in sketches in a notebook, then building each individual part yourself, then assembling all the parts and finding that everything works just as designed and planned! My primary problem that prompted this project was that my longer telescopes would hit the tripod legs when viewing almost straight upward.  Also a factor in my decision is that my astronomy tripod isn't tall enough for my longer refractor telescopes which meant I would need to sit down very low on the ground to see into the eyepiece.  I needed a pier extension to raise the mount and telescope higher.   Some may ask why I don't just extend the legs fully to gain some overall height but this is a bad idea for two reasons.  First, it will do nothing for me to resolve the telescope colliding with the tripod legs.  And next, the more yo

A s usual, whenever my health allows, I tend to be working on a few projects at the same time.  At the moment, I'm working on making a couple of aperture masks for one of my telescopes, I'm doing some landscaping around the house, I'm making some small springtime repairs around the house as I come across them, I'm repairing the grill in our outdoor kitchen, and I'm designing and making a telescope mount pier extension.  This particular blog entry is about the pier extension project thus far.   Quite often, especially if I use one of my longer refractor telescopes but it is not limited to this one telescope, I find myself wishing I had a taller tripod for my telescope mount.  Sometimes, even when sitting on a very low stool, I need to get my butt off the stool and sit on the ground because the eyepiece is closer to the ground than my eye in a sitting position.  If I use my longest refractor telescope, the telescope will even hit the tripod legs when pointing at or ne