Thanks guys! Matt, hopefully your woodern tripod has gone well?
Things were pretty quiet on the observatory front over the winter, plus I was kept busy with other things, but… now at last I’ve been able to do more on it, and it’s nearly finished!
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Yesterday the iron tripod was bolted to the concrete. Two drill bits later (oops!), and after a fair bit of levelling, the iron monster was attached to the ground. The Mitty Euro Wedge was then attached, followed by even more levelling. Ending with the bubble meter almost perfectly centred, I think we did pretty well. I’m sure it’s not pointing exactly north yet, but it’s within a few degrees, which is adjustable on the wedge. After all that, finally the telescope was lifted up to its new home!
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Sitting high up there, it looked good, it looked very good! Plus there was enough room above the scope to close the roof safely. Phew!! Our measurements were correct.
I took off the Orion 80mm ShortTube that I’m going to use as a autoguide scope and put the Meade finder scope back on. Pointing it towards a little water tower down the road, I lined it up with the main scope. To be honest I expected that part to be harder, but the adjustments on the finder scope worked well. Then I decided to point it at something more interesting, and had no troubles finding the moon up there in the blue afternoon sky.
Even in the daylight, seeing such a close up view of the moon with my 26mm eyepiece was literally a real eye opener! I could see each crater like I’d only ever seen before on TV, but this time it was with my very own eyes. Seeing the rough surface, I thought about what it would have been like to see the moon being slammed into by such huge asteroids. Switching to my 10mm eyepiece, I was amazed again at the detail I could see, this time around the edge of the craters. As the sun went down and the stars came out, I stood there just watching the moon.
The setup worked really well, and knocking on the iron tripod did cause some vibrations, but they dissipated very quickly indeed. Attaching a camera and taking some photos will be a better test, but so far it looks promising.
The next step will be filling up gaps in the building with filler, to keep rats out. One left a nice little (well, not so little actually!) gift for me on the shelf the other day. Then a few last touches, like a lip on the shelf to make it more earthquake safe, and a dew guard for my netbook to sit under.
Telescope wise, I have the challenge of polar aligning it next. I’ll have to read up on how to do that.
Last year with my DSLR, a 400mm zoom lens and a 2x tele-convertor I was able to just make out a couple of dots that were moons around Jupiter, but the planet itself was just a white blob. There’s not much to see planet wise here right now, but when they do come out, I can’t wait to see their colors. Then of course there’s all sorts of other targets to set my eyes on.
I’ve dreamed of having a telescope since I was a little kid, and now with one here, I can explore the universe… from an old chicken shed
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