Friday, December 2, 2011

Status Update

The 14 is back and kudos to Meade.  The problem was a loose worm gear, but Meade cleaned and collimated the scope.  The collimation is text book perfect, and the cleaning removed some pollen spots from the corrector.  I took the scope out this evening and retrained it.  GOTOs are bang on and put deep sky objects on the imaging chip every time.  I'll put the pix up in the next day or two as I get chance to process them.

The big news is that I am taking delivery of a 20 inch ACF MAX in the next few weeks.  This scope is truly massive and needs a permanent home.  I have access to some land SW of town with a gorgeous horizon.  I'm in the observatory planning stage--I've ruled out domes and the only sensible option is a roll-off roof observatory.  I'll post more as I narrow the designs down.

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16 hour integration of the Heart Nebula with the Dwarf 3 telescope

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