New Purchase

[peter_4059]

After many years of looking I've recently purchased a new OTA - a Meade LXD55 SN10. It arrived today in excellent condition thanks to the original owner (Andrew) and Pack and Send.

I've got it set up in a temporary fashion on my EQ6 and hope to give it a run tomorrow night if the weather behaves however things won't really swing into action until I can change out the focuser (replacement on its way from Moonlite).

I'm really impressed with the build quality of this OTA - seamless tube and nice thick white paint coating. The optics appear to be in very good condition and eyeballing the collimation seems to be pretty good too.

Great to have a new project and looking forward to giving this a try at Astrofest in a few months time.

Pictures to follow....

:party2:

[Logieberra]

That's very exciting Peter. Gotta love the new (used) scope feeling. I remember drooling over those scopes, back in the 90s when Meade mailed out their glossy product brouchers. Enjoy :)

[Kunama]

Congratulations Peter, sounds like there is a lot of life left in the 'old girl'.

[RickS]

Congrats, Peter. Glad you didn't buy it at new moon :D

[traveller]

Welcome to the 10" SN club Peter,
You will have plenty of fun with that OTA. My mirror is in very good nick as well, the sealed tube made the difference i think.
Looking forward to the photos.
Bo

[peter_4059]

Well its been a couple of months and I've been testing things out and changing stuff. I've upgraded the focuser to a Moonlite however I believe the tube around the focuser is flexing under the weight of my QSI683-ws8 so today the next round of surgery. I've installed a 3mm thick aluminium backing plate inside the OTA where the focuser attaches. This is glued and bolted in place to stiffen the tube in this area. While I had the scope in bits today I also replaced the original primary collimation springs with some much heavier ones - CSC C-712 from Bunnings which are rated at 199 N each. I've installed some Bob's Knobs on the secondary to avoid having to use a screw driver near the corrector plate. Finally, tonight I'm going to flock the inside of the OTA. After looking at various options, I've decided to use some Scopestuff self adhesive flocking material which is incredibly black.
http://www.scopestuff.com/ss_flok.htm


Hopefully I'll have it all back together tomorrow.

[Smyths77]

Great to see you're into modifying Peter. The flocking is an excellent idea. I need to do this to my Dob. Is the scopestuff flocking better than the flocking you get at the hobby shops? This should be a good scope for imaging.

Stuart

[DavidTrap]

Cool link on the flocking page to the high altitude C-11.

How did you shape your aluminium reinforcing?

Hope to see you out at Leyburn sometime?

DT

[ozstronomer]

Sound like it's coming together nicely, Peter

Hopefully the strengthening behind the focuser may help the triangle stars in your test shots

Geoff

[peter_4059]

Got the tube all flocked today - quite a complicated job but it worked out quite well. It's all back together now and I've re-collimated with the Catseye gear so just need some clear weather to see if the stiffening plate around the focuser is going to let me use the QSI.

[peter_4059]

Hi Stuart. The Scopestuff flocking is much blacker than the felt I have previously used. Have a look at the picture - the Scopestuff is on the right and the felt from Spotlight is the lighter material.



David,

I originally got the plate rolled at Pronto Aluminium however that was for my Newt (never installed it because the newt was stiff enough). I had to adjust the diameter to suit the SN10 which I did at a friend's workshop.

[peter_4059]

Finally had some decent weather last night so despite the full moon I took the opportunity to see if my OTA internal reinforcement around the focuser had resolved the issue of the tube bending under the weight of my heavy QSI683-ws8. I also wanted to see if the coma corrector spacing was right. After fiddling around with polar alignment for quite a while I managed to capture 10 x 2 minute luminance subs on M27 before it disappeared behind the house. I think the flexure issue has gone and the coma corrector seems to be working well.

Thanks for looking :hi:

[RickS]

Looks pretty good, Peter!

[DavidTrap]

Passes muster!!

Hopefully this weather change sticks around for a while...

DT

[peter_4059]

Cheers Rick and David. Do you think the focus looks better? I've got SGP autofocus working again now.

[RickS]

I don't know the field well, Peter. The stars look bigger than in some of the images I've seen but they may have had significant star reduction during the processing.

Do you have something that will measure the FWHM of a few raw subs? The SubframeSelector script in PI will analyse a group of subs. FWHMEccentricity will do a nice map of a single sub to show you how the FWHM and Eccentricity varies spatially. Both useful tools for checking the quality of your data...

Cheers,
Rick.

[troypiggo]

Looking nice and flat, mate.