[Quark (Trevor)]

Originally Posted by DavidU

I was looking at your setup last night. I like the way you and Bird have the cooled cold plate with fan assisted air flow. This seems to give sharpness to the imaging. Is the 16" Meade mirror standard?
Noice work Trev

Thanks David, yes my mirror is a standard 16" F4.5 Meade.
When I purchased it about 16 years ago I only wanted the mirror, I was already in the process of building a very heavy GEM for the project. I was told that the only way I could get it was to buy a complete scope as a unit. The cheapest way to do this was to go with the 16" Starfinder DOB.

There were major problems with the primary mirror cell and more critically, the secondary mirror mount. The same design that was used on their smaller scopes was used on the 16". The mass of a 4" flat elliptical secondary was considerably more than its mount could handle which led to an inordinate amount of flex which made it impossible to hold collimation.

I designed and built my own 27 point primary mirror cell and a secondary mirror mount that could cope with the mass involved and really have not looked back.

From the standard of the images that this scope produces it is pretty obvious that the quality of the mirrors is not to bad.

David, on the value of the peltier, I would say to you that amateurs that don't have them, simply have no idea of what really could seeing looks like. On the face of it, that may sound like a pretty obnoxious comment and that is most definitely not my intent. It is just a statement of fact. I probably should add a qualification to the above remarks, this is really only pertinent to truly hi-res planetary imaging, where objects are being imaged at exceptionally long F/L which sort of relates to very high magnification.

Originally Posted by telecasterguru

Very interesting Trevor. Thanks for the link.

Frank

Thanks Frank.