Adam, I'll happily join in the hijacking of my thread
I have had two observing sessions with the 8" reflector on the EQ5. They have convinced me that I'm preferably a dob user for observation!
What's the story? Well I saw a member offering an 8" OTA with rings - new, but for a nice discount price. I couldn't resist that. Then I got this thought in my mind that it was about time I learnt about using an equatorial mount. My experience to date was of a dob-mounted reflector and a fork-mounted SCT on a wedge. I knew there was more to life than those options.
I picked up (literally - on a trip to Sydney) a secondhand EQ5 with dual motor drives and put the lot together.
First thing I realised was that the OTA was designed for imaging - I couldn't pull focus with my eyepieces
No problem, a 35mm extension tube has fixed that. But that discovery has also given me the idea of sticking my DSLR into the focusser (I have T-ring and Hotech's SCA T-ring adapter) and snapping a few images of bright star clusters - perhaps this coming weekend. I found I needed an extension on the counterweight bar - a 35mm Panoptic sure adds some weight to the OTA!
All set up and I started using. So far I have only performed a relatively rough polar alignment - mainly pointing it towards south is the issue. A compass on the ground a little distance from the scope is fairly rough. Being level and setting the altitude is easier. It does have a polar scope but getting down trying to use one of those, particularly for the SCP with its almost non-existent bright stars, seems like the height of machochism to me
. This coming weekend, I will (promise) learn the basics of drift aligning.
What's good?
Motors and gears! Tracking, tracking and tracking!
So nice when you have a 5mm eyepiece in place and Jupiter in the FOV, and it pretty well sits there while the RA motor does its job. A little tweak of the DEC control buttons from time to time (When I get rich, I will have to retrofit Servocat to my coming SDM.) I also found that, with the 8", the eyepiece height was fairly convenient - I could use my observing chair much of the time without getting tangled up with the mount and tripod. Of course, the newtonian has its benefits - cheap, robust, reasonable collimation is a snap to do.
What's not so good?
Now I know why people are always moving towards piers and big solid mounts. The 8" reflector OTA on the EQ5 wobbles on touch and with even a light breeze. I don't think there is much more I can do to improve the current setup. The tripod legs are almost fully closed. The dovetail rail is held as firmly as I can make it. There are just too many points in the EQ5 mount where it comes down to a small (and therefore open to flexure) cross-section of support as distinct from the big broad rigidity that can be obtained in a solid dob or fork-mounted on wedge design. Second problem is the rotation of the OTA as it is pointed around the sky. There is a limit to easily looking into the eyepiece, and lying on your back on a chair under the scope looking straight up into the eyepiece certainly exceeds my limit
Also, compared with a dob, the risk of an eyepiece falling out of the focusser as the OTA is moved around is greater. As is the subject of this thread, finding a quick way to rotate the OTA back to an acceptable orientation will make life much easier. Pointing the scope is a challenge. With a dob, my brain easily copes with left/right and up/down. A scope on an EQ mount does not go left/right nor up/down! I was getting better after a few hours but sometimes it would just not go where I wanted it to. I was a little frustrated getting it onto 47 Tuc, for example, so I guess it is an issue near the SCP. Actually it was probably no worse than a dob near the "dob hole". Also, finding those damn lock levers once I had the target in the finderscope was annoying - as you move the scope to the target, those lock levers always go and hide on the opposite side of the scope to where your brain last remembers them to be!
I found it useful to have an assistant to find and lock them while I held the OTA on target. Now that doesn't seem right!
I also gather that if you end up in position with the counterweight bar doing its best to point to the zenith, you forgot to do a flip somewhere along the line!
So there are my thoughts. I'll spend more time with it and will try some photography so I can at least say that I've tried. But I have a feeling that an EQ and Eric weren't meant for each other.
Actually very clear! I can come up with something like that. Thanks! It also needs a few handles to grab onto to perform the rotation.
. Think Ra/Dec young padiwan...
