A quick spin with the 10" eq dob

[doppler (Rick)]

Finally made some adapter plates to fit tube rings to my new 10" skywatcher dob and mounted it to my old cave portable eq pier mount. I left the dob mounts on so I can still use it as a dob. It only has a RA drive so sub exposures were limited to between 20 and 30 seconds. All these pics were taken with an unmoded 1100d canon at 3200 iso with a total stacked exposure time of no more than 2 minutes.

M83, M8, M20, M17, NGC 5139 and NGC 5128

Rick

[raymo]

We have already got Ripper Rex, now we've got Ripper Rick.
raymo

[doppler (Rick)]

Thanks Raymo, now I need to build a cover for the mount so I don't have to carry it back to the shed all the time. There would be over 16kg's of counterweight on it now. But I'm pleased with the results with such short exposures and the coma is not as bad as the 10" f4.5 meade I tried before. (this one is f 4.7)
Rick

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Pretty good for less than 2 minutes!

[Rex]

Hey they're not bad at all Rick. Nice set up you have made there as well. So with only an RA drive if you had really good polar alignment, would you be able to guide successfully, obviously only using RA adjustments?

[doppler (Rick)]

Originally Posted by Rex

Hey they're not bad at all Rick. Nice set up you have made there as well. So with only an RA drive if you had really good polar alignment, would you be able to guide successfully, obviously only using RA adjustments?

Thanks Rex, The scope rides really well on the mount. I have embedded and marked some 200mm square pavers in the ground so alignment is fairly quick each time. I use a drive corrector to adjust the tracking speed but thats it. This is a work in progress, so I would like to make some kind of slow motion controller for the dec axis.
Rick

[batema (Mark)]

I would be happy with that. Nice set up and yes a cover is essential.