Jeff's Blog

It’s just under two hours for me to reach this site in the GW Forest, coming from northern Virginia. The last 4 miles or so are some fairly rough single-track up the side of a mountain. Conditions were excellent, completely dry, dead calm, and clear as a bell by 10:30PM.

Here you can see the view looking due S/SW.

A family having dinner at a campsite here causing the blue smoke. They left about 9PM. A long trek just for dinner…

Some more photos, in various directions.

Mr. Boosky, my wife’s Dachsund. Keeping guard.

A zoom shot, looking south. Fantastic view.

I’m standing dead on that green arrow below.

Zooming out. Not a soul within miles.

VIDEO

The ADM Losmandy 11″ universal plate came in today. Mounted the clamshell rings right onto it, perfect spacing, just where I wanted it. Tossed it on the mount, added the 3lbs of counterweight to the front, balanced both axes, and voila – done. Focuser drawtube extended 1/2″ past rough focus just to make sure I have some wiggle room in balancing. Here’s a bunch of pics.

So I ordered some clamshell rings to get away from the 3-point ring setup, and the risk of flexure. The ADM 3-point rings are just awesome, but I wanted to try a piggy-back setup with the new triplet refractor and guidescope to get away from the side-by-side stuff. The clamshell rings say ‘TMB’ on them and they’re real high-quality, so I guess Astro-Tech acquired them in bulk from TMB at some point.

Below you’ll see the triplet mounted in the clamshells, with a 7″ ADM vixen dovetail bar screwed in atop the clamshells. Then, two small vixen dovetails clamp to that rail, and they each have the 3-point ADM rings attached above. Since the Orion shorttube 80 guidescope and SSAG plus 3-point rings weigh nearly nothing, I’m not worried as much about flexure with that. With the Parsec, the Orion motorized filter wheel, and the heavy motorized MoonLite focuser on the triplet, I needed rigidity down below.

One of the coolest things about this setup is that I can use the mini-dovetail knobs to remove the guidescope without changing the setup of the 3-point rings, and slide it right on the top long vixen dovetail bar on the AT8RC. No more flipping between mini-dovetail clamps and vixen rail as I have been doing up until now.

Lastly, the Losmandy plate the clamshells will attach to arrives tomorrow, hopefully the space between the holes sets up right. I’ll add to this post tomorrow when it arrives.

Here are some pictures:

Comes in two boxes, the power supply in the little one, and the large one. The little one was inside the larger one of course, I just took it out to take a picture.

Opening the larger box. I took everything out of the bubble wrap already, it was nicely wrapped up.

A quick measurement. 14″ across, about 13″ useable.

The power supply and controller.

Powered on at a low setting. I don’t remember exactly what.

Powered on at a higher setting, again, not sure what specifically.

I updated the FTDI driver to the latest and greatest. This panel works fine alongside the other FTDI driver-based pieces of hardware I have installed and will work fine with them at the same time as well.

The software side of things. Brightness is 0-255 in single steps.

Press connect, and voila…

A typical flat.

I aimed for ~26K ADU.

Got the MoonLite focuser back from Ron’s shop in PA today. Tested it in the garage, works smooth as glass. Attached it to the ED80T-CF, put it back in the ADM rings, and ready to run a bunch of V-Curves in FocusMax the next time I’m out. I also picked up a second Astro-Tech ATF illuminated multiple reticle – these things are by *far* the best finders I’ve ever seen, touched, or used. Solid as a rock and the brightness is adjustable in 8 increments. I won’t use anything else at this point.

So, first, here’s a DivX AVI video of the focuser moving out 7500 steps and then back in, to position 0. This shows the Parsec 8300M, Nautilus motorized filter wheel and Astro-Tech ATFF field-flattener in the drawtube.

MoonLite CF motorized focuser.

Here’s the focuser itself.

Another shot.

And another.

The Astro-Tech ATF.

Focuser screwed onto the scope.

Another shot.

Dew shield fully extended.

Now the rings on.

One last shot.

Because the camera end is so heavy I use 3lbs of counterweight on the front end of the Vixen bar. Here’s the ADM piece for that.

And the ATF mounted.