A big thanks to Steve at myastroshop

[marki]

A few weeks ago whilst in a stupid rush I had a little accident. My refractor (about 4kg + moonlite) slipped from the saddle, fell about 6 ft and landed squarely on my vixen starbook breaking the front cover . I managed to piece the screen back together using super glue and everything still worked but now I was looking through a cracked and smuged screen which did not allow me to see all the info. I was about to give up and buy a new starbook when I thought "wonder if I can just buy the cover"? A quick email to Steve and it was all sorted. He wrangled one from vixen in Japan and had it on my doorstep a week later for a very small fee. Now my starbook looks and works as good as new .

Thanks Steve you are a champ .

Mark

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

that he is

[TrevorW]

Steve's knowledgeable and helpful glad to see you sorted it out

[Jen]

Well Marki, dont be in too much of a rush when you put things away next time Good to hear its all better again

[marki]

Jen I wasn't putting it away I was setting up. Not to worry I have already kicked my own butt . Glad to have found a solution though as starbooks are not cheap.

Mark

[Jen]

Originally Posted by marki

Jen I wasn't putting it away I was setting up. Not to worry I have already kicked my own butt . Glad to have found a solution though as starbooks are not cheap.

Mark

oh so you were being impatient in setting up then were ya LOL Ummm i have to ask what is a starbook

[marki]

Yes I was beening impatient but I had good reasons....honest. I usually start setting up at about 4.30pm if I want to take pics so I can take my sweet time and get everything spot on. On this particular day I got home late but worse still had had an inspiration during the day which I just could not wait to try out. Biggest problem was I changed configuration from a side by side 2 scope setup to a single scope setup with an off axis guider so none of my index marks I use for balancing the rig were correct. This meant stuffing around and moving the scope in the saddle to get the dec balance right. I was getting cranky as time was being wasted with a few false starts and my best alignment stars for alignmaster (a polar aligning program) were about to become useless. I just got careless in the mad stupid rush and did not secure the scope in the saddle properly after yet another move. Out it came and landed with a thump firstly on the starbook and then the ground. When setup on my pier with the vixen half pier the scope sits about 7 ft above the ground (good to get over the nieghbours shrubs along the fence line) but it's a long way down.

The starbook is basically a computer which runs the goto functions on vixen mounts. It has a large screen because the controller has a built in planetarium which once aligned shows the area of the sky where the scope is pointing. It does a whole lot of other things as well, bit like having starry night in the palm of your hand.I added a couple of small pics so you can see what it looks like.

Mark