I've been a member here for over a year now, but never had much to say, lurking on the sidelines, waiting, hoping maybe something would come up in the classifieds at the right time and price, now that I have a scope of my own I thought it was time I introduce myself and participate.
Astronomy has been something I've been interested in since I was a kid, but somehow obtaining a telescope had always eluded me until recently. Initially my parents wrote it off as too expensive when I was young. Later on we lived out near the Perth Observatory and my parents went to one of their events, my dad being rather unimpressed discouraged my interest, so it kinda went on the back burner for a while, but the nerd in me always wanted to see for myself. Fast forward to my late 20's and finally I was able to see through a small wobbly skywatcher newtonian which would shake for a minute if you so much as gave it a dirty look, or farted in it's general direction. It wasn't much but it was enough to fire up the interest again. Unfortunately a few days before my 30th birthday an injury lead me to having some xrays which in turn lead to the discovery that I had been suffering from cancer for a number of months. (I had been tired and lethargic for a while, the doc kept telling me I was run down cause I needed to exercise more, go figure). In this case multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer and almost unheard of in people around my age. Since then with my mind on treatment and financially no longer able to justify such expenses, my astronomy experiences would be limited to the web and other peoples telescopes. However during this time I had been hoping maybe a bargain would pop up when I had a few dollars to spare. Rather fortunately however the guy my other half and I had been sharing our rental with also had an interest in astronomy and a reasonable setup of a Celestron C8 on a Advance GT mount. So while I didn't have the freedom to go look at will, I'd been able to get a small feed of the stars and sky, enough to keep the hunger ravenous and me frustrated with my lack of optics.
Well 3 and a half years past my diagnosis, I'm still alive and recently in remission from a bone marrow transplant, YAY!!!!! And the other thing that is awesome is I finally have a telescope.
Enter what I like to call the ghetto scope. My requirements for a first scope were a bit different to most people. Basically a dob beyond a tabletop size was out of the question, one of the side effects of the cancer is it forms tumours in bone and consequently my femurs and hips look like swiss cheese under xray as well as a couple holes in my skull and theres three vertebrae with parts broken off. So my lifting capacity is pretty limited and I cant really be bent over for much time, this isn't such a huge problem though as really my tastes astronomy wise tend to consist of just roaming the sky with a low power and enjoying the beauty the sky has to offer. So I'd set my mind on getting my hands on a short refractor on a compact, light but hopefully relatively stable mount. Sadly that didn't quite happen, but while on the net a few weeks ago I decided to search Cash Converters online website for telescopes, just out of curiousity. Amongst a small scattering of useless dept store type scopes was mention of a Celestron Nexstar 114 GT for $200, no pics, no details but at that price it seemed like it might be a bargain and something at the time I could potentially stretch finances to afford. The store was just down the road from my grandfathers place, so the trip across the city wouldn't be a waste anyway.
So I hopped in our little Suzuki and proceeded on my merry way. Upon arrival the scope was nowhere to be seen and the "oh damn it sold and I missed out" disappointment hit, undiscouraged, I decided to ask a young staff member about it. "Ahh that's out back" he said "It kept getting knocked over and is now kinda beaten up, you probably should've called first" "I'll go get it for you". A few minutes later he returns with a plastic bag of parts and the rather sad looking Nexstar Reflector, flopping around on a mount with the plastic side cover split away and a number of dents in the tube. "Well I wont be buying that" I thought to myself, but out of curiousity decided I'd look it over anyhow. The nice young staff member chatted away and explained how they got it in and kids kept pulling it to the ground etc. While I fished through the bag of goodies and proceeded to try fire up the computer with the mixed bag of old batteries I'd been given. Finally it fired up and moved around a bit but the altitude drive whist making noise clearly wasn't engaging and then the controller display filled with black bars as the computer crashed. "This could be really expensive to fix" I said, he said they'd offer warranty etc. if I couldn't get it going I could bring it back within 3 months. I said I wasn't comfortable with that arrangement because of the amount of work and potentially parts that may be required. He said he'd go have a talk to the manager, a few minutes later he came back and said "would you take it for $100 without warranty?". I thought to myself, "Well the primary mirror looks fine, seems like if I can collimate it at very least I can make a little tabletop dob out of the OTA and the tripod might be handy later, plus theres a red dot finder and a 25mm EP there. What the hell, it'll at very least give me a project to keep me occupied for a while."
Well a little hard work paid off nicely, I dismantled the mount to find no significant damage other than the screws that held the plastic cover on the side of the mount had pulled through their holes. Parts however needed to be rearranged, so someone had been there before me. My guess is some Cash Converters employee had attempted a repair job with no clue or brain cells. After a complete disassembly and reassembly, I plugged in the controller, stuffed some new cells in the battery pack and the mount sprung to life. Awesome!!! Now on to the OTA, I spent ages on it, no matter what I tried I just couldn't seem to get anything more than a blur visible through the focuser. Reading up on the bird-jones design of the scope, I decided I would pull out the corrector lens and see if that would make collimation at least somewhat doable. After dismantling the focuser, the cause of my troubles became readily apparent, as a 10mm EP dropped out of the tube along with the corrector lens. With a bit of trail and error and a film canister I got the collimation done and got the scope ready for its first night out.
Well I'm happy to report it's all working now, cosmetically looking much better also. The first night out provided some ok views of the moon and some fun scanning the milky way but a little limited due to the amazingly poor plastic fantastic EP's and lack of a moon filter, but hey it works, and I can't complain for what I paid. All up the setup has cost me $100 for the scope, $5 for some new screws, $7 for some epoxy, a little ingenuity and several hours worth of time that l thoroughly enjoyed whilst expending it. Now I have a fully functioning goto scope which fits my needs pretty well, It's nice and light, easy on my back and after a week of cloudy skys since first light, it seems tonight is going to provide me with a second night out.
Awesome!!!
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