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

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, I thought about just using the gear as a slow motion

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