VilleM

First photos of the assembled frame, here you can also see how the telescope folds in a smaller space for transportation. 😎

V1 for most if not of the parts are now designed! I'm currently printing them, it will be interesting to see how they work in practice and if they need any modifications to their dimensions. Also on the second picture you can visualize how the entire thing will come together.

Hey folks! After my observing trip to Tenerife I have been playing with an idea to bring even bigger scope with me next time. However there is not alot of ultra-compact telescopes available that would fit in my luggage. Goals for this project are: • Small form factor • Easy assembly • Rigid enough for visual astronomy • Light weight • Affordable, easy to make design for community So lets get started! Yesterday I printed the secondary mirror assembly. It will fit a standard Sky-Watcher focuser with 80mm wide, 5mm deep flange. This part requires no supports, and I try to keep every other part the same way for easy printing. I printed this with my Bambu Labs P1P printer in PETG. The spider vanes came out great, they feel really solid. I plan to use 20mm aluminum tube to get the desired length for the tube as it is affordable, easy to cut, available in any hardware store and also cheap. For the optics, the primary and secondary mirror are from Amazon. I plan to use 114mm primary and 50x35mm secondary mirror. They only set me back ~50€ which is really cheap. While I wait for them to arrive I can print out the OTA. All of the files will be uploaded to Thingiverse as this project goes on, if anyone wants to make their own. Stay tuned for updates! 😎

Thank you for your positive comments everyone! tico: it was rather shaky if you touched the eyepiece but I have always practiced a habit of placing my eye in a right spot without touching the scope at all. So for me it wasn't an issue, I also positioned my gear behind a rocky outcrop on windy nights and this way I could get away with a small mount.

My dream of observing the southern skies finally realized last week as I got an opportunity to go on an observing trip to Mt. Teide, Tenerife. I haven't sketched anything in 3 ... 4 years now due to getting into astrophotography more. Also my past job has made my hands quite easily getting sore and swollen due to a medical condition so this keeps me from doing sketching or writing for extended periods or with accuracy. I did feel it during this trip too but I didn't let it stop me from having fun! The trip was a huge success for me. In total I had four clear nights in a week to observe the stars from Minas De San Jose - a remarkable desert of pumice banks adorned with massive volcanic rock pillars. It was as though I had set foot on a distant planet; the desolate terrain bore a striking resemblance to the surface of Mars. Here are observations made in 9th and 11th of October and also a photograph of my travel gear and me observing the helix nebula. Notice the 3D printed energy-drink counterweight system to save on baggage weight! 😁 The scope I had with me is 80/560mm APO and Celestron X-Cel LX 12mm & 25mm eyepieces. I used 12mm for every sketch and 25mm to find my targets. I also brought Baader Hyperion 8mm with me but I found out that for my scope the 12mm X-Cel was far superior in edge sharpness and the magnification was more suitable with the small aperture I had available. My favorite deep sky observation was definitely Messier 8 and 11, they looked amazing and I could distinguish both with the naked eye too.

I use self regulating heater cables, I think they are used in camper vans and such to prevent water pipes icing over and are commonly available in hardware stores. They just are plug-n-play solution as they don't need any kind of controller, as ambient temperature gets colder they heat up and vice versa. I don't have a good photo of them, but I think you get the idea of how they are installed (the green cables next to tracks). This solution has worked flawlessly since day one in temperatures below -30C on some nights without any ice forming on the tracks. On to other things, I visited the observatory last weekend to bring my new toy in - a modded 10" f/4.7 Sky-Watcher Newtonian. I replaced the primary mirror springs, reinforced the tube with aluminium bars and upgraded the focuser for a Baader SteelTrack. This replaces my trusty Esprit 100mm f/5.5 - if it holds collimation. At least I cant see any flexing with collimation tools but I guess a real world testing is still needed for a peace of mind. I got this for a real bargain, only 100 euros as the previous owner just wanted to get rid of it so I decided to give it a go with upgrades mentioned above. And before you laugh at my zip-tied "counterweights", they are not a permanent solution (although fitting as my scope is not the prettiest anyways ) I just wanted to test how much more weights I need to bring on my next trip to the observatory before imaging season 2023 starts here up north. Still two long months before astronomical darkness returns!

This object is one of the few that need no introduction, it is the brightest galaxy visible from northern hemisphere. Visible even to the naked eye on a moonless night! The Messier 31 has been on my imaging list forever but I haven't done it any justice until now. In this two panel mosaic you can also see two satelite galaxies Messier 32 and Messier 110. M31 was first described by Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in the year 964 as "nebulous smear" or "small cloud". Little did he know that this small cloud was home for estimated one trillion stars flying towards him 110 kilometres per second. M31 is one of about 100 observable blueshifted galaxies, it is expected to collide directly with the Milky Way in about 4 billion years creating a giant elliptical or a disc galaxy. Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi was certainly not the only one that studied this spectacular galaxy. Over time it was cataloged by Giovanni Batista Hodierna in 1654, by Ismaël Bullialdus 1664, Edmund Halley in 1716, and again by Charles Messier in 1764 in his famous Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters giving it the designation we know today. Taken with SkyWatcher Esprit 100mm f/5.5, ZWO ASI1600MM-C, Losmandy G11, guided with ASI224MC as finder-guider, TS Optics LRGB filters. L: 163x120s, R: 114x120s, G: 108x120s, B: 124x120s. Total exposure time for this two panel mosaic is 17 hours.

Hi! Summer is approaching fast here in Finland once again - that means end of astronomical darkness for about 4 months. I collected all 12 deep sky images from this season in a poster. Total exposure time is around 250 hours that I gathered from my self-built remote observatory. Now its time to prepare for the next season!

The Wizard Nebula in Hubble palette. This open cluster (NGC 7380) was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1787. It is located in the constellation of Cepheus. The surrounding emission nebula was included in William Herschel's catalogue as he was aware of his sisters discovery. Taken from my self-built remote observatory in Finland, the total exposure time is 40 hours. Gear and sub-exposure times: SkyWatcher Esprit 100mm f/5.5, ZWO ASI1600MM-C, Losmandy G11, guided with ASI224MC as finder-guider. Baader narrowband filters, TS Optics RGB filters. Ha: 155x300s, OIII: 129x300s, SII: 187x300s, R/G/B for stars 10x120s.

Thank you everyone! You guys just saved me a 3 hour trip to the obsy.

Hi! Does anyone know the what thread / lenght does Losmandy G11 have for RA worm adjustment block? I stripped one of the hex keys and Im not sure what to look for as a replacement.

Thank you Alan! I started this project on the first of January and I took photos for it in 11 nights, last exposures I took 4th of March. I had to delete some data sets that had high clouds on them. On the downside of having long nights in the winter there is no astronomical darkness in the summer at all, so its a double-edged sword I think.

Hello folks, this is me latest image. In the spring Ursa Major is very high in the sky so I can shoot it all night long. We have had some terrible weather lately but now it seems to be clearing up, for this image I shot a total of 38 hours of LRGB and Ha. C&C welcome as always! Larger version can be seen here: https://www.evenfall.space/post/gems-of-ursa-major

My scope at work at the Castle of clouds observatory under the moonlit sky and auroras. 😎

Id love to use mains power or large battery but I try to keep my setup airplane ready and light for travelling. But thanks for the tips, Ill try with a battery next time the skies are clear.

Indeed there is, its selectable to EQ / Lunar / Solar and Im familiar with it. I think this might be a power problem because when I use battery power with AA batteries the tracking seems very unsteady and seems to stop every 10 seconds or so before moving again. This doesnt happen when the mount is plugged in with an AC adapter. Weird.

Hello, I have recently started building a portable setup with my 100mm f/5 achromatic refractor. Im using ASI120MM and CaK to capture solar disk with it. However it seems that my mount is not up for the job. Im using NexStar SLT and the image seems to drift very fast out of the view! So fast that I need to apply corrections manually from the handset every few seconds to keep part of the solar disk on the FoV. Ive set the mount level, it is tracking in Alt Az mode ( I dont have a wedge). Also I tried to take some long exposures with a DSLR and 16mm lens but I only got to about 20 seconds before stars started to drift. I can get 15s subs without tracking at all so its really small improvement. My question to NexStar SLT owners is that is this kind of behaviour really normal? I would think that even with alt az mount you could get atleast somewhat decent tracking although field rotation will become an issue at some point. Ive never reached that point, everything just seems to drift out of the frame even with aligned goto and correct time / date / location settings.

Here is an image I shot of the Sh2-132, also know as The Lion Nebula. It is a faint emission nebula in the constellation of Cepheus. This project was particularly challenging to process because the field of view has so many diffrent colours and brightness of the nebulosity also varies alot - not to mension the rich starfield that can be too prominent. After two days of tweaking I finally achieved the desired results. Also this is my longest project yet, with total integration time of ~31 hours in SHORGB palette in two panel mosaic. Larger image can be seen at my blog: https://www.evenfall.space/post/lion-s-roar C&C welcome, as always.

Haha, yes I've seen him and also Enterprise casually passing by of our observatory every sunday.. 🤣 I really just use the stars from RGB data to get more colour to the stars.

Thank you for advice Ian. We have improved the ventilation and it seems to have stopped the fungus from spreading. I might try to kill the fungus with the bleach solution aswell. Atleast it seems like a good and inexpensive idea to test out. Lately we have had terrible weather so most of my deep sky work has been waiting for clear nights. The fact that I shot a 12 hour OIII sequence with wrong gain settings didnt help that either! (That ended up in trash can... sigh.) Anyways, here is one of my recent images, WR134. This is SHORGB image with total integration time of ~19 hours. I hope you like it. But atleast my all sky camera has been very busy with one bright bolide and two rocket lauches, Soyuz-2 and also Atlas V which was smaller but still a nice catch.

New mount for the allsky camera is now finished! Its still waiting for some instruments but for now we have surveilance camera, two 4G antennas and ZWO ASI224MC as an allsky camera on it. The small white thing on the right side of the pole will house a weather station in the future. I also ordered a new heater for the dome of the camera from Dew Control - it works really well. 😃

Thank you! It is a fantastic mount indeed, I have not adjusted anything mechanical and it performs with 0.3...0.5" guiding all night with my 50mm guidescope. If I would use OAG I think I could do better but for this focal lenght its more than enough.

This dark nebula lies at a distance of 1200 light-years from Earth in the Constellation of Cepheus. Because the nebula is in the Milky Way's plane it stand outs from the background filled with colourful stars of our galaxy, a keen eye can also distinguish three separate dense dust cores that actually are star formation regions. 🙂 Taken from my self-made remote observatory in eastern Finland with SkyWatcher Esprit 100mm f/5.5, ZWO ASI1600MM-C, Losmandy G11, guided with ASI224MC as finder-guider, TS Optics LRGB filters. L: 262x120s, R: 92x120s, G: 100x120s, B: 80x120s. Total integration time is ~18 hours.

This week I found out that my new mount doesnt like custom park positions, somehow it seems to lose its aligment completely if its not pointing at NCP with counterweights down. Im not at my strongest in debugging softwares so I approached the problem from outside of the box. The custom park position was needed only to point the scope at my flat panel - so I moved the panel to the roll-off roof. 😃 It was easy to get power there though the wheels of the roof because they are solid steel and so is the track theyre rolling on. Now the panel is essentially powered just like trains are! As an added bonus I can use it as a work light. Ive also started building a new pole for the all sky camera, I want to move my weather station from my telescope to the pole to get more realistic temperature readings. I also will add an SQM meter and a security camera to the pole. The whole thing will be able to tilt 90 degrees to make maintenance easier. Now it just needs paint and the stuff that goes on it! Also Ive started fiddling with few arduino projects to the observatory lately. A park sensor that prevents roof moving if telescope isnt parked and also sensor bundle that will read voltages and temperatures from multiple things to verify they actually work. For example, all sky camera dew heater or heaters for the tracks, etc. But more on these in the future.

We did some big upgrades this weekend, have a look! 😍 https://www.evenfall.space/post/automate-my-weekend-please