Small Maintenance Tasks
I 'm still feeling rather lousy and coughing whenever I move so I'm laying low at home. This morning, however, I accomplished a few small maintenance tasks on my astronomy gear. First, I wanted to install a better saddle on my newly converted EXOS2 manual mount (photo at right). I don't care for saddles with a single bolt holding my telescope on the mount. I prefer two pressure clamps holding my telescopes. I had ordered an appropriate saddle a few weeks ago and it arrived this past week. I just needed to drill a hole and then assemble it so that was a small and easy task that proved to be unremarkable. Then I moved to my best telescope. My Explore Scientific 102mm APO refractor recently developed a sticky focuser. It wasn't sticking to a complete stop but it was not as smooth as I like it. Any bit of stickiness in the focuser causes some vibration in your view so I new I wanted to resolve this little problem before I got worse. This task was a little more i