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xvariablestarx

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    Male
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    Science, the arts, philosophy
  • Location
    Limerick, Ireland

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  1. I got a 2nd hand scope in the mail, and put it on a cobbled together mount I made. It will be going to a young cousin of mine and will hopefully get them interested in the hobby.
  2. I got an ST-80 today, the rings I already had.
  3. Take a picture of what you see down the drawtube/focuser of the telescope, without an eyepiece in it, and post here. that might help somebody figure out if your mirrors are misaligned.
  4. I will need to experiment with this later, I need to get a better alt-az mount and tripod for the scope instead of trying to use the eq1 I have it mounted on at the moment. I am starting to accept the scope optical limitations. I have been away from the hobby for months now, doing other things, I need to get back into it.
  5. I moved the mirror as close as I could to the center of the tube. With the zoom eyepiece I could get the magnification to the maximum without the image dimming, at about 9mm, no sign of bands on Jupiter though
  6. I got strange results with the Tasco. I can get good focus on a star, but trying to focus on something like the Moon ends up with muddy or blurry results. I am putting the Tasco aside for now, until I get a brainwave about how to fix it. One positive thing is that the star seemed brighter than with the old mirror, so perhaps I am on the right track.
  7. I moved the secondary mirror stalk, a few millimetres towards the tube opening, and installed the new secondary mirror. I also center spotted the primary mirror, so I could get some indication of what was happening inside optically. Next I need a clear night so I can test on some stars. I am hopeful some improvement has been done with the scope.
  8. I am making one final attempt, putting in a new secondary mirror and moving the secondary mirror slightly towards the opening of the scope.
  9. Not updated this in a few weeks. I ordered a 0.965 inch Plossl, but because of some unknown issue, it never fully got to my local post office and was shipped back to the shipper. So I took drastic measures, I cut down the scopes focuser, to allow it to focus properly with the 1.25 inch to 0.965 adaptor which I put in it. I was partly successful, in that it could focus on stars at low magnification, but now an ugly thing about the scope, which I never was able to fix, reared its head; the views with the scope are very dim, and inferior by far, to those given with my 70mm/900mm refractor. I think the issue is with the existing square secondary mirror it has, and while I could possible mount another oval secondary mirror I have in the tube, I still would have the issue of having a primary mirror I cannot collimate, and a secondary which I can only collimate by twisting the stalk it is on. I have learned a bit about mirrors and backfocus from my DIY attempts to fix the scope, but I have come to an end of what I can do with my abilities, so the scope will retired, improved, but not improved enough.
  10. Haven't updated this thread in a while. I put the scope on a new Sparta mount, it can now point at zenith, or any place else using slow motion controls. I got a new mirror in the main today. It is a bit wider than the original mirror, and a lot thicker, so I can't use the original mounting hardware, so I am attempting to glue the mirror in place. There are disadvantages to doing this, but I have little choice I think.
  11. These are the dudes who make it: https://www.st-optics.cn/
  12. Let me tell you what I posted on another site: The majority of the mount is metal, feels like some form of Aluminium The Alt and Azimuth locking screws have a tendency to get in the way of the alt and azimuth slow motion controls. The two screws for connecting the scope's dovetail to the mount hold it securely. The two slow motion control elements, look like metal but are in fact a cheap plastic. The cost of the mount was around €60(edit actually €79), but with tax and shipping the total cost came to just over €100. I tend to keep the altitude locking screw as tight as possible so the slow motion control fully works for that direction, the azimuth screw I keep looser so I can move the scope manually/faster side to side. Is it worth it? Probably, if you have a tripod already and want to try it out, but it is not a high quality item in my estimation. I will be keeping it and using it though The scopes I put on it were a 100mm Mak and a 75mm 700mm(ish) tube length reflector, both seemed fine on it.
  13. I got a Sparta mount (some type of Porta II clone) and a Svbony 25mm Plossl eyepiece from Aliexpress. No idea as to their quality as haven't tried them yet.
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