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Showing posts with the label upgrades

Upgraded New Solar Mount

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The new saddle for my new SolarQuest mount arrived this morning...  finally (USPS shipping is horrendous) ...  so I spent a little time upgrading the mount this morning.  I did a bit of work upgrading it yesterday too but I had been waiting for this new saddle to arrive for quite a while and I finally got that done this morning. In the photo, below, you can see the original saddle that came already installed on the SolarQuest mount.  I've had some bad experiences with this type of saddle...  the cast aluminum tends to crack and break eventually, the single bolt damages dovetail bars, and the single bolt isn't a secure as it should be...  so I wanted to replace it with a better one to keep my telescopes as secure as possible. In this next photo, you can see the new replacement saddle.  It is a much heavier duty saddle and it is actually a large clamp to hold the telescope rather than just a single bolt holding the telescope in place.  Replacing this saddle was easy when the new

Computer Upgrades

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I haven't written in a while so I'm long overdue for an update.  I was going to write about a few different things in this blog entry that have kept me away from typing here and I actually started typing but I quickly realized that the first thing I was typing about really should have a blog entry of its own so I'm going to stick with this morning's topic...  my latest computer upgrades.  I'll write about other topics in separate blog entries sometime later.  My primary desktop computer that I use every single day is now about five years old.  It is still a powerful computer even by today's standards but it needed some preventative maintenance as well as a few upgrades.  Five years of daily use is a long time.   The primary issue that needed to be resolved is that my C: drive was almost full.  It was so full that just browsing the internet for a few days would collect enough temporary files that my C: drive would move into the red warning area (less than 10gb&

New Look for Old Telescope

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I 'm still mending a sprained MCL in my right knee so I'm still not really accomplishing much on my To-Do list.  Every now and then, however, I feel halfway decent and am able to jump into a small little project at the kitchen table.  This still needs to be short because I need to keep changing positions...  no sitting for a long period of time, no standing for a long period of time.  This keeps the size of these occasional projects on the very small side.  Plus, the longer I work on any project, the more likely I am to do something stupid with my knee.  The last thing I want at this point is to be set back to square one yet again.   I have this old Celestron 70mm refractor telescope that, in recent years, I adapted to a different type of mount.  In order to do that upgrade, I needed to remove a bunch of mounting hardware that was bolted through the optical tube.  This hardware wasn't needed and was in the way of the new mounting cradle rings and dovetail bar so most of the

Small Astonomy Project

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W e've done a lot of walking over the past week which has resulted in my ankle and knee swelling up again so I'm laying a bit low lately.  To recap, back in January, I first sprained my ankle badly enough that I could not put any weight on my left leg at all.  That required about four months to heal well enough to do some things again.  However, the four months of hobbling around with all my weight on my right leg only resulted in a sprained MCL (medial collateral ligament) on the side of my right knee.  The knee injury was mostly better until we did miles and miles of walking this past week.  Now my knee is painful and swollen again so I am now back to ice and elevation for a good chunk of each day.  My left ankle is a bit painful too but nothing like my right knee. Putting my health problems aside, I always try to accomplish something, anything, each day.  Mostly, I've spent my time at the piano lately but I have managed to squeeze in a few other little things too.  Time

A Little Productivity on a Down Day

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Unfortunately, the consequences of the work I accomplished on our wildflower gardens and landscaping over the weekend has caught up with me.  Saturday was a productive few hours for some much needed yardwork. I felt pretty good on Sunday... only relatively minor spinal pain... but, apparently, the inflammation in my spine was slowly building over the course of a few days because by Monday I could hardly walk and the pain was stingingly brutal. I spent Monday and Tuesday doing whatever I could to alleviate the pain and inflammation. This mean occasional stretching but mostly staying off my feet. It meant extra anti-inflammatory medications. It meant extra water intake. It meant occasional icing of my spine... and I truly hate using ice at this point! After almost two decades of struggling with spinal injuries, there are some things which really get to me and ice is one of them. It just bothers me to even think about applying ice to my spine. That being said, when the pain gets to