Meade Ultrawedge

[Bob Jones]

Hi all

I live at South West Rocks midway between Brisbane and Sydney and am about to take delivery of an Ultrawedge for my 12" LX200 GPS which has only 2" clearance from the roof of my shed/observatory.

At the recent Queensland Astrofest I measured other LX 200's scopes with wedges and believe that a wedge will not increase the height of the scope when parked. It looks to me that the tube can be rotated so that it is actually slightly lower than if parked in Alt/Az. Can anyone verify this?
I really don’t want have to lower the tripod.

Also, I am keen to purchase a Canon 40D DSLX camera but am concerned about comments that my scope is not suitable for deep sky objects. Is anyone having success with a similar set up??

Currently use a Mallincam Hyper Plus Color video camera which gives fantastic viewing on a 9" Speco Monitor. I am hoping that the wedge will give a small improvement here too.

Regards
Bob Jones

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

I have the ultra wedge on my 12" LX200, I haven't measured it exactly but it looks like the top of the dec arms/ tube are higher when using the wedge. Think about it raising the base and tilting to 55 deg v's on the base at 90 degrees....
One of the BEST things I've done in a while was to cut about 200mm of the tripod legs!! The heavy duty field tripod I use is now only 28" high; much, much easier to lift the 12" onto and solid as a brick outbuilding.
An easy job to do: remove the legs, two screws at the top and the roll pin on the spreader.
Put the legs ( well at least the top part with the casting) on the BBQ for 3-5mins ( low heat!) and this will soften the glue; pull the tube out of the casting. Cut the tubes to length and re-assemble with some araldite.
The spreader bars need to be cut back to suit and new holes drilled for the roll pins. Took about 1 1/2hr at the weekend.
Strongly recommended.

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

When you use a compressor (Optec Nextgen 0.5 is good with a Canon ( I have the 350D)) the 12" will be a great f5 imaging platform.
Never managed to get the Meade x0.33 reducer to focus properly with the Canon ( to much back focus required??)

[coldspace]

Bob,
I agree with Merlin66 in that the optec compressors work excellent with the LX200 scopes.
I use a Mallincam hyper plus as well and a 12 200R scope and have been using the MFR3 reducer that Rock sent out and was happy with that untill I got the Optec.33 and .7 compressors, and WOW.
These made a huge difference in the image quality coming out of the Mallincam.
I spent a couple of nights with Gavin and his Mallincam at my place with the 12 R and down at his place with his 14 R trying different reducers, he was using Rock's older MFR 4 and the Optec .33 with the Optec mallincam "C" adapter was clearly a step up in both image quality and field size compared to the others.

I find that smaller planetaries are too small and this is where the .7 is good. I think Optec is discontinuing the .33 soon as it is no good for the larger chips comming out now but for the Mallincam video its perfect.
Thanks for the link for those 7 inch lcd TV's when you answered my question on the Yahoo group recently. I got one for the scope and use it at the OTA for focus and viewing and now run the S video to my laptop via the imaging source converter for better viewing and recording.

Regards Matt.