nigelbeaumont

First light with my nice new 130PDS (and first image after almost 2 months of rain and wind and clouds.....). Keeping it simple for its first outing, so 25 x 120 seconds with Canon 450D, aligned and stacked with Nebulosity and then levels, stretching and curve tweaking in Photoshop CS2. Pleased with the result, although looking at the other images I have a lot to learn...

I thought about that, but worried that I'd put a side load on the bolt if the dimple wasn't exactly in line with the bolt (although I was thinking of something deeper similar to Gunnar's mod. When I shortened the bolt I very carefully rounded the top to make sure the high point bearing against the block was on the centre line of the bolt - hopefully this will avoid wandering

Since I had my EQ6 in pieces to fit the Rowan Astronomy belt conversion, I decided to improve the altitude adjustment on it -. I started with a lump of 1" x 2" aluminium, and filed one end to fit the profile of the existing lug (I measured the curvature of the face to be about 35 mm radius). I've then secured it with two screws into the lug and one into the body plus a bit or araldite to fill in the final gaps and spread any load evenly over the lug face. Hopefully if I've got my measurements and mark-ups right, the face that the adjustment bolt bears against will be at right angles to the bolt when set at my latitude of about 54 degrees, so it won't tend to slide down or bend. I've cut about 20 mm off the bolt so it doesn't clash with the polarscope cover. All done by hand with hacksaw and file plus scribe and centre punch to mark out the lines, except for an electric drill for the holes (too lazy to use the hand drill...)