That was one of the main things I thought may be a problem but it turns out the Titan handles it easily. The original 25/1 gearboxes have been upgraded to 50/1 and the motors have never even been warm. The counter weight shaft is carrying 60kg and I estimate the scope weight at 65kg. Tracking is excellent with a good polar alignment showing a minor drift after 10 minutes. For deep sky I would spend some time on the alignment but for planetary it's no so important. The seeing is not good at the moment although brief moments show the optics look 1st class. The only Saturn image I have processed so far although in poor seeing l am happy with. When the seeing improves I shall find out how good it really is.
If that is poor seeing, then good seeing.. looking forward to it.
I can easily see Saturn's hexagonal pole in your image as well. great stuff
Yes mine is 1mm, anything will dent if you try. I'm not all that worried about small dents more concerned with it's thermal properties. The only small dents I have is because I was careless. If you permanently mount it then no problems, if you are going to transport it often then you will either not worry about it or build a couple of boxes.
Here is my latest Mars image in 685nm. This shows details as small as 0.5 arc seconds, also I had another 2 day visit from NASA engineer Padma Yanamandra-Fisher who runs their amateur collaboration section.
My imaging train now includes a non rotating helical focuser inside is a HD12mm Ortho lens which allows me to change my image sampling from my default setting of 10 to between 5-15 pixels per arc second. I hope to be able to use a higher setting if and when the seeing is excellent.
Due to the quality of my images deteriorating slowly over several months I started looking for the cause. It appeared to be a mirror problem although I was unable to find anything that looked wrong. I removed the mirror to check the supports however everything looked okay. When I reassembled it the images looked even worse so I had found the problem but how to fix it I was unsure. After trying several things including removing the numerous supports underneath and replacing them with s/s the problem was still apparent. Thinking it was perhaps the wire edge supports I renewed them with no success. The only solution was to replace everything with an 18 point whiffletree design and a new designed edge support. I am pleased to say it has performed perfectly since the upgrade has been completed .
