PeterStudz

Moon from last night. This was taken with a Skywatcher Skyliner 200p that I’m restoring. It came without a base (there’s something in the DIY section). Wanted to test the base as it’s just usable before I finish it off and the moon was an easy target. There’s an issue with the primary mirror and it was only roughly collimated. StarGuider 12mm eyepiece using a handheld iPhone 12 with standard camera app. Single shot with some basic editing and cropping.

I’ve been busy and have a few other pictures to post. Maybe tomorrow.

Good advise about the mirror. I had kind of come to that conclusion too. And of course I need some sort of mount in order to properly test it out.

I’ll let you know how I get on. It’s annoying that work is getting in the way of my construction fun but will get there!

I’ll post an update when it’s finished. Making this has been fun and by doing so you really appreciate what a fantastic design this is. Mr Dobson was a cleaver guy! It’s downhill from here, although “finishing off” can take as long as building. 

I also took the mirror cell out as I wanted to remove the altitude bearings as part of the build. It’s not too bad. Rather dirty and it’ll need a careful clean. I thought it might be a little stiff to remove but it was far harder to get back in! After that I’ll get everything working and if necessary consider getting it recoated. 

On 11/05/2021 at 16:21, Grumpy Martian said:

Progress is looking good.

The rocker box is coming along. I haven’t as yet attached it to the ground board and it needs trimming up, bracing along the bottom and finishing off. Easier to line up when square and trim up later. But even just resting it on the ground board the weight alone means it’s actually useable. Smooth too and doesn’t seem to be sticky when it matters.

I decided to keep the original altitude side bearings. This meant that the left/right sides of the rocker box hand to be accurate within a millimetre or two. To do this I used the OTA itself as a jig for the rocker box sides. Making sure that the sides and front edges were all dead square (I haven’t got a power saw so cut by hand) meant that the whole thing went together with just a quick check over with a set square - no clamping necessary. 

I’ve used some PTFE and wood blocks for the altitude bearings to rest on. The holes for the tension knobs being oversized. I also managed to replicate the “patented tension control handles” with an M10 knob and a simple thrust bearing. Works really well.

It now has a ground board. Manage to get some time over the Bank Holiday weekend to knock this up. Two bits of 18mm ply. Bottom an octagon, top a circle 520mm in diameter. Decided to try Teflon pads over a lazy suzan, although I’ve made it so it can be easily fiddled with and modified if required. There’s a sheet of 2mm textured ABS in an attempt to get the required “sticktion”. Seems to work well, although I’ll only find out for sure when using the telescope. To keep costs down I went for a sheet that doesn’t quite cover the base. Anything larger would have been twice the price and I wasn’t sure if it would work. Finished off with anti-vibration washing machine feet. 

Obviously now need to do the rocker box. That’s when I can get a free day!

Very nice. This is the kind of thing that I want to try. Although being in Bortle 8 I’ve really got to travel somewhere else. 

I like this as it’s immediate and still gives the feeling you are looking through a telescope.

I did this last Tuesday, 6th April in the early hours. My second attempt at M3 and personally I’m happy with the result given the limited gear and my inexperience. Taken with an iPhone 12, cropped and edited with the standard camera app plus Filterstorm. Telescope Slywatcher Skyhawk 1145P on EQ1 with economy motor drive. StarGuider 12mm eyepiece. Single 30 second exposure with the standard camera app.

After doing this, messing around and observing M3 for a couple of hours I decided to see if I could see the Leo Treo. I’ve never tried looking at these before. And Leo wasn’t in a good position. I’m in Southampton which suffers from a considerable amount of light pollution. From my garden East to South is best (the higher the better). But anything SSW to West is poor as that’s right over the docks which are lit up like an Christmas tree all night an every night. And that’s where Leo was by the time I decided to have a look. 

But as hard as I tried I could not see any hint of the galaxies with my eyes. So I decided to stick my iPhone to the eyepiece and take a searching 30 sec exposure. Then move one FOV and take another. After a few attempts the galaxies appeared like magic on the phone screen. The camera was showing something that I could not see with my eyes. Sure, faint but obvious. Even NGC 3628. OK, they are very faint and washed out (you might need to use averted vision on the picture to see them - lol) but that’s hardly surprising especially with a small telescope. In a decent dark location it would surely be much better. I wasn’t going to post this here but then I thought what the hell! Haven’t edited it much - just cropped, rotated - so you can get an idea how faint they are and what the light pollution was like. Personally I was over the moon just to find them.

I have plans of going somewhere in the New Forest , which isn’t far away, and giving it a proper go.

3 hours ago, Grumpy Martian said:

Wish you well with the project Peter. Great to meet you, socially/anti socially distancing ofcourse. Lol.

Oh I wish that I had a telescope when I was a child.

Many thanks Martin. I’ll let you know how I get on, good or bad. But I’m confident I can make something from it. And it was great to meet you too. 
 

All of this brings back memories of my first telescope as a child. And back then something like this would have been my dream telescope. 

Many thanks to @Grumpy Martian for arranging to meet me at a motorway service station near my home and giving me this telescope for free. There are some “dimples” on the primary mirror so it might require recoating. But I’ve already done a rough collimation, propped it up against a garden chair and looked at a random bit and of sky. It seems to focus OK.

It hasn’t got a base so I’ll need to make one out of ply. Will probably take a while for me to get going although my daughter wants to use it now. 

These are great sketches and thanks for sharing. As someone else has already pointed out - it looks just like you are looking down the eyepiece.  And as far as I can tell skilled sketching is the only way to create a picture that looks like  the image you’d see in the eyepiece. A camera can’t do it.

This is our setup as it stands but it’s very much a work in progress. We’ve only had a small telescope - a Sky-Watcher 1145p with EQ1 for a few months. Many of the ideas I got via old threads on this forum. 

Really wanted to avoid a GEM mount but I’m now getting to quite like it. Mind, it’s not so great for my daughter as I have to set everything up first, find a target (sometimes with a bit of help form her) and at that point we can both take in the view through the eyepiece. And being in Southampton, Bortle 8, doesn’t make it any easier. Although tinkering (I do enjoy tinkering) and tightening things up on the EQ1 has improved it significantly. 

Taking pictures with a smartphone, my daughters suggestion, kind of evolved from simply pointing the phone down the eyepiece. We’ve also got the economy drive which I’ve modified. I’ve added a larger knob, replaced the little 9v battery with a 12v rechargeable lead acid, knocked down to 9v, and added a mini volt meter across the motor terminals. The idea being that I can now dial-in a voltage - the same volts should drive things at near enough the same speed. This has significantly improved the way it works and taken away much frustration. Of course not intended or just used for astrophotography, although we can now get some vital extra seconds when taking pictures, it really helps keeping the target in view while fiddling with eyepieces and phone mounts. And most of these bits I had sitting doing nothing down my shed.

I also beefed up the little focuser. There was far too much play in the draw tube and hanging a phone off the top would pull on the assembly creating distortions every time a picture was taken. I added Teflon tape to the draw tube and added an extra thumb screw that holds the eyepiece. In fact these thumb screws are just threaded into plastic and we’d already striped one, so metal thread inserts were also added. 

I did splash out on a NexYZ phone mount and although the idea is great we’ve had a few issues with it. The main one is that it’s so heavy. Using this plus an iPhone 12 adds almost half a kilo, throwing everything way off balance and pulling on the draw tube. So at the moment I’ve settled on a cheap mount off eBay. It actually fits our StarGuider eyepieces really securely once the rubber eye-cups are removed (see pics). And it’s very light. The only faff is positioning the phone lens so it points exactly down the hole. This has to be repeated every time it’s used. Since the same phone is being used this should ideally be a once only operation. So, once the sweet spot has been found I intend to clamp it down with a screw, and make a ply extension plate to hold the bottom of the phone. That way you just pop the phone in and tighten it down without having to fiddle around. And we should be able to do this in the dark too.

A few tips/things I’ve discovered:

Practice setting everything up in daylight. And practice some more.

Make sure your phone camera lens is clean and clear of dew. I spent a whole night trying to find out why my pictures were fuzzy. I’d carefully kept my eyepieces clean. Eventually discovering that my camera lens was covered in dew.

Do a very basic star test on screen with the phone mounted to your telescope. That way you can get a good idea if everything is true.

Take loads of shots. You can always delete and then keep the best.

I recently came across this. It might have been mentioned before and you all know about it so I apologise if that’s the case. I’ve found it quite useful...

https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/SMBooks/AstrophotographyV1.pdf

Welcome! I’m new here and very much a beginning. But I would certainly be interested in any sketching skills and wisdom.

11 hours ago, happy-kat said:

That's a great capture, very clear.

Did you look at imaging challenge #1

Thanks! I haven’t but will look into it.

I should be out looking at the moon tonight as for once it’s clear. But sadly I have other things to do. So here’s my first attempt at a nearly full moon from last month, February 25th.

Sky-Watcher Skyhawk 1145p, StarGuider eyepiece (I’ve forgotten which one), iPhone 12 and a cheap no-name phone mount. I just pressed the shutter button. Edited a little in the standard camera app.

From my rather light polluted sky’s I’ve had virtually no luck even seeing a fuzzy blob when I’ve looked at things like M3 with any sort of moon. However, once the moon has gone I’ve had much better luck. Still hard to see much detail but M3 is a far better sight. I even managed a phone picture which bought out some structure. 

22 hours ago, Tiny Clanger said:

Kudos to you for patience and persistence !

Standard RDFs just appear to project a red dot on the sky,  like a poundshop version of a pilot's heads - up display. They don't magnify , or do anything more useful than offer the ability to adjust that dot to line up with the view of the 'scope. They do have their uses though,especially ones like the Rigel quickfinder and the telrad which show you not a single aiming dot but target circles of known degree sizes to make it possible to do that degree moving stuff you used your family and many fingers for !

Optical finders come in many flavours and the usual sort of price range from around £40 to ....strewth, how much ?! Straight through ones ( straight tubes) have all the same astro-yoga , chiropractor business generating problems as am RDF, you still have to lay your head affectionately on the 'scope tube at whatever angle to try and line your eye up with the thing.

Hence the near universal popularity of right angled finders, which have a little prism in the back, like a tiny refractor telescope (which is exactly what they are) . So you look in from the side , so much easier :not only that, but all the ones I've seen can be rotated in the collar part of the mount they come with, so you can adjust the angle of the part you look through to be convenient for your particular telescope. Some right angle finders show the view reversed, the popular  RACI type does not, RACI stands for right angled correct image , i.e. it has a prism inside which corrects the image, and what you see through a RACI is a view the right way up, and the right way round , just like the view through binoculars.

I know the whole 'just spend more money on this accessory' thing is not always a welcome suggestion for folk who have other calls on their income, but honestly if I was going to only ever buy one extra item to make an existing telescope more useable , it would be a 6x30 RACI. Bigger ones are better ( the 6x30 is like binocular stat.s, 6 = front lens diameter in mm, 30 = magnification ) but bigger ones cost more , £60 ish plus for a 9x50

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/finders/astro-essentials-9x50-right-angled-erecting-finderscope.html

6x30 RACIs are around £40

https://www.harrisontelescopes.co.uk/acatalog/skywatcher-6x30-right-angled-erect-image-finder--bracket.html#SID=1693

https://www.bristolcameras.co.uk/p-sky-watcher-6x30-right-angle-erect-image-finderscope.htm

Mind you, the things are as rare as rocking horse manure at  the moment, out of stock everywhere, so there's no need to make a hasty choice !

Heather

 

Many thanks for these suggestions. 

I have thought about getting a better finder. But we’ve only had a telescope for 3 months now. And I’ve been more interested in getting some better eyepieces. My initial plan was going to get something once a month or so. But then I noticed stock being low, prices going up etc and I sort of “panicked” and bought several at once. Not that I now regret it though!

We are finding things if a bit slowly. And it’s disappointing to find a target only to be let down by a poor quality eyepiece. So these seemed far more important.

And at this level the other thing that we’ve found fun is just scanning the sky at random. Or after we’ve failed to locate something. Hard to do with a flimsy EQ1 but doable. Even boating the telescope about at what appears to the naked eye a black bit of sky with reveal a host of stars. And I’ve quickly learnt that as long as you are in focus and see something “fuzzy it’s something interesting.

Getting back to better finder. Something as light as possible would be best for us. Will take a good look at what’s around but not going to rush.

Peter

We have a similar size telescope. It might be a bit better that yours was but not by much. I also live in Southampton which is Bortle 8. I’m very much a beginner too.

And apart for something extremely bright, like the moon, I’ve never been able to see anything in the RDF. All I do is move the telescope so that the target is at the top outer edge of the RDF, nudge the telescope up ever so slightly in the hope that the target will then be roughly in the finders view then get my daughter (if she’s there) to lock the mount in place. It’s hard for me to do it alone without the telescope moving. However, more often than not the target is somewhere there when I look in a low power eyepiece - at 20x. 
 

If what we are trying to locate is high in the sky then when using the RDF I’m often literally lying flat on the ground. It’s hardly comfortable but it works. Still, we have managed to find things that we cannot even see here with the naked eye. The M3 cluster was one recent example. I new it was roughly between two bright stars, which we could see, but there was a large area of nothing in between. This involved me dividing the distance between the two stars using my fingers and then having my daughter move the telescope so many fingers. We have a flimsy EQ1 and this moves in what seems a random fashion. Me looking down the finder her moving the telescope around until I told her to stop. Comical maybe but after around 20 mins of searching we found the thing. 

I was very young but living in the States at the time of Apollo. And my first memory is watching live the first moon landing. Extremely exciting times! Someone I know who was lucky enough to see a Saturn V launch I can remember saying something like “it felt like his bones were vibrating under his flesh”. And I think that was from about 3 miles away.

Thanks, some really good suggestions here. Eg I hadn’t thought of Almach at all and looking it up that’s a must see. I can also understand the “slippery slope” suggestion. Although I prefer visual I’m already looking at possible upgrade paths.  Have already invested in a couple of StarGuiders - decent eyepieces are very nice to handle. Or perhaps that’s just me and a bit weird!

I’ve been doing phone snaps (standard iPhone 12) for a couple of months now. This started when my daughter wanted pictures of things we’d seen on her telescope. It’s a small telescope, a Sky-Watcher Skyhawk 1145p on an EQ1 and we are in Southampton which suffers for considerable light pollution - officially Bortle 8. This started with pointing the phone down the eyepiece, then gaffer taping the phone to the lens, soon followed by using  a mount, later on modifying an economy EQ1 drive to help with getting slightly longer exposure times. Results are getting progressively better. We’ve had good views of the Orion Nebula, Pleiades and lots and lots of the moon. Here are a few other recent examples. 

M81 & M82 - 42x magnification 30sec exposure 

Beehive cluster - 20x magnification 30sec exposure 

M3 - 100x magnification 10sec exposure

I’d posted M81 & M82 in another section and someone asked me to post it here. All using the standard camera app in Night Mode. No stacking or anything fancy. I’ve circle cropped and darkened (basically black point) the background on some as they are for my daughters school project. I wanted to get the “looking down the eyepiece vibe”! I’m chuffed at the M81 & M82 galaxy result. Our first time locating something we couldn’t see with the naked eye. In fact even in the eyepiece M81 in our Bortle 8 sky was the faintest smudge and I couldn’t even see any hint of M82. I wasn’t even sure if seeing/photographing on a phone was possible given the light pollution and small aperture. 

M3 gave me lots of grief. It was faint and small, then cloud cover came over, lifting after about 1.5hrs just as I was about to give up. After that the position of the phone mount wasn’t quite there so ended up with kidney beaning. Finally finished at 3:30am and I was tired! Will definitely give it another go. That’s one of the problems doing this with young children - they need some sleep and my daughter had long since gone to bed.

Our setup might be worth mentioning and helpful for others. I had to beef up the focuser a little. Having a mount and phone hanging off the eyepiece was causing the assembly to flex. Enough to introduce unwanted distortions. Also balance of the tube with that extra weight. We are also using a cheap economy drive on the EQ1. But the small 9v battery replaced with a larger rechargeable lead acid battery and a mini-volt meter so it’s possible to dial back a previous setting. Maybe I should show want I mean with pictures in another post as this is dragging on!

With that we can get exposures of up to 30 sec with up to 50x. And around 15 sec with 100x. An improvement over nothing but we are finding the whole experience extremely fun! Personally I think that this type of imagining is best if you think of it sitting somewhere between sketching and full on astrophotography.

Interestingly I’ve found that for me the cheapest has been best.

I have the NeXYZ but as has been pointed out it has annoying flaws. It’s also damn heavy at 293 grams. By the time a smartphone is added it starts to pull on the eyepiece ever so slightly but enough to effectively take it just a bit but annoyingly out of collimation. Although I have a small telescope so you might be OK with something larger. I also find that the weight puts everything way out of balance.

For me I have StarGuiders. I’ve found that with the eyecup removed this cheap lightweight (£6, 78 gram) holder works perfectly. And grips very securely. I can also get Z-axis adjustment by moving the screw-out eyecup. It’s the holder top-left in the above post.

We did have a look at Mars. Couldn’t not do as she recognised it by eye when looking at the sky. I explained to her why it would be so small by drawing a diagram on a bit of paper. But at least her comment when she saw it in the telescope was “you can now see it’s a planet and definitely not a star”. So kind of a win there.

I’ll post something in the mobile phone section later. I’m going to be busy for a while.