Tony Acorn

Love the home-made trolley Roog and it is inspiring me to plan something similar as long as I can clear a bit of space in my garden shed sufficient to hold my 250mm SkyWatcher Flexi-Dob. I too have an issue with a step up into the shed and a very small garden so the slope will be quite severe. Keeping the 'scope outside will mean it is less likely to suffer from condensation and four relatively small castor wheels with jacking screws attached to their sides seems a good idea. Making the base as wide as the Dob's base is fine to help get it through the shed door but I will extend the length a little so I can put the extra power batteries into an open box so they don't wander around. My latest aquisition on the astronomy front is an HEQ5 mount and tripod plus a 150P-DS OTA. Although not as heavy as the big Dob, it still is a bit of a beast to locate without bashing it so if Stage 1 (the Dob) works, I just may go on to Stage 2 for that one.

Hello. I have dabbled at the very basic edges of astronomy off and on for many years. It probably started with seeing the NASA programme in 1960s on TV, developed when I was at sea for at least a decade (wonderful unpolluted skies, even saw Apollo 7 launch off Florida in October 1968) and it has become a bit of a hobby over the last few years. I moved to this location (near Hitchin) in 2018 when the surroundings were open fields to the west and north. Now, like so many places, the fields are covered in concrete and brick and light pollution becomes ever more prevalent so good viewing almost certainly means I need to travel. I have moved up to a 150P-DS OTA and an HEQ 5 Pro tracking mount which of course need a bit of effort to cart around and I am very scared of knocking the 'scope out of alignment, although I do have a collimator. I also am interested in photography - predominantly landscape and nature - and I have a reasonable cropped sensor DSLR (Nikon D7200, Samyang 14mm f2.4 and Sigma 100-400mm f5-6.3 superzoom etc) with which I have captured a few good images of the moon, the Milky Way and some meteors and Comety Neowise. I did manage to stack a number of images to create one of my better Milky Way images but these were not taken using the tracking mount. I would like to add my camera to the dovetail on top of my OTA on my tracking mount (it is ok weight-wise) but I need to learn how to use the mount first, hence my request for contact with local groups and members of SGL. Thanks for takingthe time to read my mindless meanderings, hope you can help me improve. Tony