Scattered Thoughts . . .

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

I 'm still down for the count with some sort of bad cold or virus so I'm not doing much (yet still testing negative for COVID...  I don't believe it though).  Whenever I attempt to do something, such as walk across a room, I start coughing and coughing and coughing.  So, I'm sitting in the house trying to figure out what I can do. The sun was shining in between lots of scattered clouds which reminded that the last time I had my good solar filter out (the other day) it did not work.  I saw no detail and then noticed that my power LED was not illuminated.  I made an assumption that my battery was the issue but I had not tested the filter again, visually, since then.  I figured that since I wasn't doing much this morning that perhaps this would be a good time to set up a telescope to test the filter.   This particular filter is a specialized hydrogen alpha filter but is really considered an "entry level" filter but that doesn't mean it is at a budget pric

So, I'm still testing negative for COVID but I am feeling quite lousy... coughing up a lung every few minutes...  also with barking coughs...  chest congestion and coughing up phlegm...  and just generally feeling lousy...  and tired.  I've been doing so much coughing that I'm sure the neighbors must think I am dying of COVID in here.   It is time to make lunch but I just want to lie down and sleep.  Coughing sometimes hurts in my chest but hurts my head most of the time.  I don't have a headache but my head pounds with each cough.  This is a really strange illness that I've never experienced before in my life.  It is very, very hard to believe that I am truly testing negative for COVID.  Then again, I have very little faith nor confidence in the accuracy of the COVID tests.  

M y little project for yesterday morning was to get the spacing adjusted correctly so I can capture the complete full disk of the sun including any prominences that may be extending from the limb in Hydrogen Alpha (Ha) with my current telescope and camera.  This little project was actually a tedious process of trial and error but I succeeded as seen in the photo (at right).   In hindsight, I should have set up my new mount for this project so I didn't have to constantly spend time tracking the sun manually.  Instead, I used a lightweight manual mount that has no slow motion controls because I am still quite sick with either COVID or a bad respiratory cold.  Setting up the new mount would have required more energy than I have right now so I opted for a much smaller mount.  Unfortunately, this smaller mount made this project a bit more tedious than it needs to be.  I was constantly nudging the telescope to keep it in my field of view as the sun slowly moved across the sky.  If I used

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

This past week has been a bit brutal as far as my health is concerned.  The major complaint is chest congestion with the associated cough and having no voice.  My O2 levels have been down as low as 88% (last night).  I haven't had a fever but I've been feeling rather lousy with a sore throat and just not feeling "right" which, I guess, would be considered malaise.   I've taken three COVID tests in the last five days and every test result has been negative.  Of course, that is good news but, honestly, I'm having great difficulty believing the accuracy of these tests.  Other than having mono a few times in the summer, I have never been sick with any bug in the summer.  I'm not feeling mono-ish so I'm not thinking it is that.  Anyway, three COVID tests in the past five days have been negative.   Another positive is that this bug hasn't seemed to negatively impact my primary illness.  That is definitely a good thing!  My primary health issues seem the

After I finished converting my old EXOS2-GoTo tracking mount into a fully manual mount, I went outside to check on the gardens around the house.  I noticed that the moon was in the sky!  I don't remember the last time I saw the moon in the sky and I know I haven't observed the moon through any of my telescopes since last fall.  I decided to head back inside to grab one of my grab-and-go telescopes...  a small telescope on a lightweight tripod.   This particular telescope is a Skywatcher 72mm ED refractor.  It is small and lightweight but has excellent optics.  I often use this same telescope for solar astronomy.  One of these nights, if we ever have a clear night when I am feeling well enough, I hope to do some nighttime imaging with it too.   When I stepped outside with the telescope, the first thing I noticed was a bird up high in a nearby tree so I pointed the telescope at this bird....  it was a dove and the view of this bird was surprisingly crisp.  I was actually hoping t

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

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