Rusted

Thank you, John, but RJ10 plugs don't fit the motor. Nor the Skywatcher paddle socket. Too wide. I've tried. I do like your neat set-up. A nice long belt with toothed sprockets reduce lateral tension. Clever use of the finder dovetail too!

Great stuff! Thank you very much for going to the trouble of posting these images John. Much appreciated. Thanks to your earlier response I have just placed an order for the same unit from FLO. Looking forwards to precision focusing again. Though I'd still like a long, straight RJ9 to RJ9 cable I haven't found one anywhere. The straight RJ9 cables on eBay are far too short. As is the coiled cable for my own application: A 7" f/12 refractor on a big GEM. Laptop on a shelf on the pier is about 3' down from the Dec axis. I'll just have to strap the Hitec box to the OTA and run 12V and USB cables up to that. The little Skywatcher motor unit still looks the part on my big FT focuser mounted on black plastic plates clamped around the focuser housing. I really didn't like the struggle to manually focus over long distances to reach near focus before operating the motor. It meant taking off the O-ring drive belt each time. Hopefully the new HiTec box will provide much faster slewing over the long focusing range of the FT3545.

Hi and thanks for your response. Good luck with the weather tonight. It's overcast here. I have been searching online for clearer images of the end panels of this control box to see exactly which sockets are provided. Is that an RJ9 telephone [motor cable] socket and a round socket for a 12V power supply? Thanks

Hi, I am about to return a [Chinese] "Skywatcher" [clone] DC focuser motor kit to the dealer for non-functioning control paddle buttons: Does anybody have any direct experience of any of the "Hitec DC" motor controllers? I'm thinking I'll keep the neat little DC gearbox-motor unit but cut out the middle man: Lose the dead hand controller and move onto "software" focusing via the imaging laptop. I'd save on postage, endless delays and potential hassle with a possibly unreliable replacement kit. Any thoughts? Thanks

Remember that foil needs an air gap on its 'hot' side to be thermally reflective. Please report back on how effective it is in practice. The externally painted, 4mm, birch plywood of my dome reaches 55C/130F on the bare insides of the panels perpendicular to the sun. Falling to 115F lower down and still 95-100F even on the shaded side. So I'm looking for a way to reduce solar gain. By fixing something internally on the southern [sunny] side, rather than changing the dome's appearance externally with white paint. I doubt that traditional matt black paint on the inside will do anything worthwhile as a "black body" radiator. Except to warm the insides further. So-called "insulating" internal paints have been proven to be almost worthless. Leading to a savage fine to a household name down in Oz. Resulting in the company dropping their premium priced [so-called] "insulating" paint products.

Thanks. I have never tried time lapse. Usually I'm just collecting videos at [say] half hour intervals. About the time between video capture and having a final image worth keeping. The main prom is showing rapid change just the same as yesterday. Around lunch time I have the worst seeing with violent vibrations of the whole image.

Another day and some fine proms are still there on the eastern limb. Full sun here today. So there is no excuse not to capture some images. Still experimenting with software and settings.

I would hesitate to build a pipe mount if it relies on standard tapered threads for bearings. By their very nature two tapers can only ever be slop-free in one situation. That is when they are screwed tightly together! I would urge you to consider making a plywood [offset] fork for your lovely [longer] refractor. Extend the baseboard forwards of the bearing area to carry a counterweight to balance the weight of the OTA. Lead weights, lead sheet from the church roof the builder's merchant or a lump of scrap metal. Anything stable will do. This used to be known as a Richard Berry Offset Fork Mounting because he popularized them rather than inventing them. An image search will turn up lots of examples. These mountings rely on buttery smooth PTFE/Teflon against PVC pipe trunnions and PTFE/Formica base bearings. The side [altitude] bearings are fitted to plywood boards attached to spaced, telescope tube rings. Much like a Dobsonian reflector but raised on a pier or tripod so you can reach the eyepiece without kneeling. A star diagonal helps here but don't make your tripod or pier too low. If you need a stronger equatorial then consider a vintage mounting which are often cheap but stable. All this assumes that your own mounting can't handle the greater moment of a longer OTA. It can quickly get expensive if you try to go up in steps until you find a suitable commercial mounting.

The major prom is still dispersing: And I owe it all to Peter and all the other H-a "nuts" for sharing their cumulative discoveries.

And a third image of the same prom showing how quickly things can change in only half an hour. This is the same set-up but capturing the prom and disk detail at the same time. Though the disk was washed out by subsequent brightening to ring out the prom. 6" f/8 + D-ERF + PST + ZWO120MC x 2 WO + SharpCap + PhotoFiltre7.

Tried a 2x WO Barlow with improved results: Needs more work on the disk.

A real struggle teasing out enough contrast.

What incredible detail you have set in granite! I must try to copy your methods.

I used to store my four refractors upright on their dewshields in the same shed where I have my various powered saws. The gap around the old Vixen focusers went completely unnoticed. That is, until I found my refractors almost opaque to any light after a few months. That was mostly astro inactivity and a considerable excess of sawing on the obs. build. I kept a loose poly bag over each OTA focuser after a good clean out. Makes me wonder how much sawdust went down my lungs! Cough! Spit! Ting!!

The [destructive] power of the wind rises as the cube of velocity and is often extremely localized. The danger is when the wind can enter a building and inflate its surfaces to destruction. Suction on corners and flat roof surfaces is often very damaging. A double garage roof, made of hefty, old fashioned, corrugated steel, unpeeled, lifted and flew hundreds of yards over the intervening houses [including ours] and lots of 40' tall trees before landing in a tight roll in the field behind us. It had rolled against the corrugations! Not with them! We only lost a quarter of our roof while the farm behind us was almost ripped to pieces when the wind got inside the giant ports of the attached barns on either side of the house. Wind speeds were about 35m/s or 70-75mph. IMO: A ROR ought to be held down with at least four angled turnbuckles into very serious eye-bolts through heavy timbers. The building ought to be bolted down to a heavy slab. Though I used lots of buried, pyramidal, concrete, carport anchors myself. Cladding it in plywood using decent screws all over the framework will provide serious triangulation against building distortion and gaps opening up. Ship-lap and T&G boards with corner braces do NOT provide the same degree of geometric stiffening as sturdy sheet materials. Though they can be easily added on top of the plywood if the appearance of boards appeals. Fortunately I have access to decoratively grooved 4x8 plywood in 9 & 12mm thickness which I used [in 12mm] throughout my two story building, using hundreds of stainless steel screws into the 2x4 and 2x6 framework. My shed next door using this technique and the same materials has survived unpainted for two decades. Both buildings entirely DIY, working alone. I used fierce, double sided, galvanized, bulldog, truss jointing 'washers' on all the joints of the shed. Screwfix sells them, amongst others. The dome has shown no signs of lifting in any wind so far. It has eight restraints on the base ring to stop it lifting. The Welsh coast was a ten year battle against the wind while I still lived there. I doubt much has changed.

Thanks for the suggestion. A hair drier might be cheaper, save electricity bills and need only used when necessary.

It's not enough to try and keep a closed space dry. The metal parts are subject to thermal inertia. Which means masses of condensation every time the temperature rises quickly and the metal lags behind. The same holds true with thick glass in an OTA of course. My refractor objectives get misted up inside after a cold night when I open up early to the warm sunshine. Even though I cover them with protective saucepan lids overnight they don't offer any "insulation."

Great post, MKHACHFE! But M29 has an excess of super-cooled MEH? Why was there nothing in the papers!

Nice prom. Sham about the filter! I make my 90mm refractor, Solar foil filters from cut down, strong plastic, bleach bottles. Which are always a tight fit on the dewshield and almost reach the objective for extra security. Mind you. I have forgotten to cap the 9x50 finder before now. Even tried to use it briefly. So I removed it completely. I should have made a Solar foil filter for that too. So it could be used.

For magnification purposes, the Binoviewer usually adds about 100mm, or slightly more to the focal length due to its glass path length. Which it promptly steals from the usual focal point. Assuming you can reach inward focus, without sawing lumps off the main tube or adding a Barlow, then you are very lucky. I only rarely use anything shorter than 20mm on my 150/1200 and 180/2160 refractors with the binoviewer. A 2x WO Barlow works wonders with 26mm & 32mm EPs. Which means 13 & 16mm equivalent EPs without a Barlow but I can still reach focus. So about the same magnification as your 15mm. The resulting magnifications are fine on the Sun and Moon and I find the longer eye relief, of "longer" EPs, offers much greater comfort when using the binoviewer.

Imagine their relief when they discover it only contains a nocturnal hobbyist with [very] strange habits.

I have recently acquired a "so-called" Japanese "tripod" stepladder. In welded aluminium tube it is very light but has a very wide base to the steps. It feels ridiculously safe compared with any other stepladder I have ever used. I have been trimming our 20' high boundary hedges from the top so you get the point. I own at least five other stepladders and have fallen from most kinds over the decades. Fortunately I usually land on my head. So have avoided serious injury so far.

For Lunar and Solar I wouldn't be without my [dealer replaced] TS binoviewers. The first was badly misaligned. The absence of floaters and relaxed viewing is like flying over the surface rather than staring through a narrow pipe at it. I use a WO 2x Barlow [much better than TS GPCs] and secondhand pairs of Meade 4000 EPs. Mostly 32, 26 & 20mm. The 40mm aren't so binov friendly IME due to excessive eye relief and very small field of view. The Sun in H-alpha shows even texture right across the disk in the binoviewers while providing suitably high powers. It requires a conscious effort with a single EP to see any detail [at all] in the center of the sun in H-a. I was afraid of these high powers before experience proved it was easily possible. Thank you, St. Peter. Proms are much more fun and intricately detailed in the binoviewer. Mere secondary artifacts with one eye. Every detail is laid bare in the binoviewer. I'm too far north to see any planets from here. A decent focuser and sturdy mounting are essential for binoviewing. My big Feather Touch made it a real pleasure. My previous 2" focuser always wanted to hurl the binoviewers down the observatory ladder and spit on their grave!

Nicely done Francis! Love those joints!

Check Gong-Ha first for large prominences before you go out. GONG H-Alpha Network Monitor Make it a favourite on your PC's or laptop's bookmark bar for quick and easy reference. Then look around the solar limb for signs of the prom as you tune your PST collar. The position of the Sun in the field of view may change the visibility of a prom depending on the PST etalon's own sweet spot. I move the sun around the field of view once I find a prom for the best view against the darkest possible background. I get the best prom views at exactly the same tuning position as maximum surface detail. Yours may need a different tuning point for each. Plan B. Still no change? Check the little drive screw is still present under the rubber tuning collar. Don't scratch your PST while lifting the ring gently with a fine screwdriver or [better] cocktail sticks. Fierce adjustment by a weight lifter might have damaged the tiny drive screw. Plan C. If you get a very dull, dark or plain solar disk your ITF filter may be "rusted" over. My secondhand PST was like this and produced worthless views until I bought a new one from Maier in the US. http://maierphotonics.com/656bandpassfilter-1.aspx