I now have an RMA and shipping details from Meade for the 14 inch; I should be able to get it out of here next week for repair. The best guess is that it is a controller board issue for the RA drive. The good news is that it may only be away for three weeks, as opposed to six.
I have done a little more work on the 10 inch LXD-55. It seems to be behaving itself now and I may try some imaging tonight if it continues to work well. The LXD-55 mount is a German Equatorial mount ('GEM"). I'm not fond of GEMs, especially with a Schmidt-Newtonian (SNT) design, as the eyepiece of the scope can end up in some very inconvenient positions. Rotating the tube can help, but it is very inconvenient. I am also concerned about the drive itself. I disassembled it, refinished the gears and re-lubed it. The result was smoother slewing, better pointing and tracking, and less vibration. Whether the mount can support deep sky imaging remains to be seen.
The Horsehead Nebula with the Dwarf 3
Here's an image of the Horsehead Nebula captured under my Bortle 8/9 skies. There's 2.38 hours of total integration time, captured i...
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I had a couple of emails asking how to defork an ETX telescope. The ETX 90 and ETX 125 were optically superb scopes, but the mounts left a... -
The clouds melted away last night with a northerly breeze and a clear, transparent sky opened up. As it does not get dark until around 10... -
Like the Ring Nebula, the Dumbbell nebula is a planetary nebula marking the end of a star's life as it puffs off its outer layers into s...
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