Happy bunny!

[furrysocks2]

After pulling my scope from storage, I've been spending most evenings (and a few days) over the last month getting back into astro - not much observing to be fair but lots of planning and playing.

I built a parallelogram mount for the 15x70s, identified everything that was wrong with my DIY 8.5" f/7.6 dob, toyed with the idea of motorising it and instead started building a lighter 8.5" f/7.5 prime focus imaging newt to make building a motorised mount easier. I've been playing with webcams, learning registax on lunar images, getting excited about video astronomy for the kids/Cubs and recently purchased a second hand ST102 to enjoy a wider field of view than I could ever get from the 8.5"s. I've been struggling with mounts - my dob base for the newt has either been too tight or too lively and I've been using either a camera tripod and pistol grip or my bike work stand for the frac. So any visual or noddy imaging has been a bit fraught.

Today, I picked up what I believe to be an EQ3 for £40.

Tidy enough and for the price, it came with a single drive motor and handset as well as a Skywatcher 150mm f/8. 

A few screws missing from the legs, missing the polar cover, probably do with a tweak, perhaps strip and rebuild for sanity's sake, scope finder needs an O ring and other wee things to put right no doubt, but basically over the moon - I finally have a "proper" mounted scope and I've all the hardware sitting here to do a DIY "goto" job on the EQ3 axes. It feels like I'm actually getting somewhere and won't have to lug the massive DIY newt around every time.

Ignoring the £100-odd on bits and pieces for my imaging newt, my "Christmas scope" is this:

• ST102 (£70)
• Altair 2" diagonal (£40)
• LN300 (£35)
• Aero 35mm (£65)
• EQ3 (£40)
• and a 6" f/8 newt to boot.

Total £250 - over budget by £50 but I feel no pain.