Just mucking about - or serious evaluation?

[Relpet]

I started a topic a week or so ago about an 80mm TS Photoline apo delivered last Monday.  Amazingly we had three and a half clear nights on the trot so I was able to get faster familiarity with it than has been my experience in the past.

Clearly the TS was bought for imaging, about which my two-year old grandson knows as much as me.  And he's in England so I can't ask him anyway.  So, there will be a lot of trial and error.

Having unobstructed views across the valley (and no neighbours to accuse me of spying on them) I was able to put the 'scope on a bench and play around with all kinds of stuff I've acquired over the last three years, mostly on the cheap - sometimes the really cheap.  This was all bought to have a stab at AP with an 8" Dob, hence the emphasis on cheap.

I have the use of a Nikon D5100 DSLR, on what seems like permanent loan from a cousin in Andorra.

I didn't have much  luck with prime focus using anything from the miscellaneous box.  Eyepiece projection, though, revealed some remarkable uses for bits I hadn't touched for many months.

Though I have an adjustable 2" extension tube it seems to need to be shorter for use with my 2" GSO Barlow to get focus.  Short of taking a hacksaw to the tube I couldn't see a way around that so that's on one side.

I had bought an unbranded 1.25" 2 x Barlow simply because it had a T-thread, (I had already bought a similar product from Seben without the thread.).

Frankly, I was stunned when this swam into focus.  So, that was the first one I would try on the moon.  For what it cost it gave a very satisfactory result (to me).  The moon filled the flip-out screen  from top to bottom compared to the tiny image in prime focus.

A 32mm GSO 1.25" EP which I bought through ABS and normally use for preliminary finding also has a thread.  So that was next.  I think it will do better than  the Barlow but while struggling (unsuccessfully) to find the right exposure for Earthshine I forgot about focusing, so that needs to be tried again.

Finally, today, I remembered a 7mm to 28mm zoom I had bought from Seben for kids to have fun with on a 4" Newt.  That too has a thread.  I trained it on the cell 'phone mast on top of a hill four kilometres distant and got focus through the whole zoom range.  So that's something to get into lunar action on the next clear night.

I'm sorry if this seems rather trivial to some but I thought it might encourage others to explore what they've already got before determining the next step, which in my experience is bound to cost more than they ever dreamed of spending.  Powermate next?  Gulp!

[MarsG76]

That's part of the hobby, experimentation, adaptation, modding and tiral and error... I've had heaps of instances where I had to mod the back focus location of the imaging gear... particularly with the BOSMA.