Scattered Thoughts . . .

I 've been waiting for some new leg brackets to arrive from England so I could fix the tripod for my little Celestron CG-2 telescope mount.  One of the brackets that holds the legs in place broke about two weeks ago.  This mount is no longer available new so finding brackets was a bit of good luck!  (The new bracket can be seen in the photo at right.) I briefly contemplated just purchasing a newer and better manual mount to replace this broken one.  I had recently upgraded this little manual mount with a new saddle as well as installed ball bearings on both axes.  This upgrade project required a bit of time and effort.  I had cutting and grinding to do...  drilling and tapping to do...  and I had to find the exact right ball bearings to fit each axis.  After my upgrade, this mount was really working very well up until this little bracket broke.  Admittedly, having a newer and slightly better manual mount would be advantageous but, since I had already put so much effort into improvi

W hen I brought my telescope and mount outside the other day to do some solar observing, a leg bracket broke on my tripod as I was opening up the tripod legs.  This bracket holds the leg in place when it is in use and the tripod is useless with a broken bracket.  My day wasn't starting out too well. I wanted to use this particular telescope mount because it has slow motion control knobs.  These slow motion controls make it easier to keep the sun in the center of my view.  As I slowly turn one knob, the sun stays in the center of my view.  Now I had to move the telescope over to another small mount.  I went back to my new-ish Alt-Az manual mount.  I really wanted to use those slow motion controls for this session though so this was a bit of a letdown.  Having another thing break and added to my to-do list was an even bigger letdown.   As you can see in the photo, the tabs that hold the spreader bar snapped off.  I had fairly recently rebuilt this mount with ball bearings and a bette