So… Venus. lol. Despite its brightness, I found it a surprisingly tough target. And I desparately needed an IR filter. Taken with a Philips Vesta Pro webcam (lens removed), a Vesta to 1.25″ adapter, and a 2.5x Meade barlow. The telescope was an 8″ Meade LX50. Focusing an 8″ f/10 with a 2.5x barlow, and a webcam, was an absolute beast.
I seriously started to doubt my sanity when the alarm clock went off at 2:45am. I found myself pulling on layer after layer of clothing before dragging my tired carcass outside to join the telescope in the crystal clear 4ºC January weather. The moon looks like countless other full moons I’ve seen before. Maybe a little brighter than usual, but maybe that’s just my imagination.
I was starting to doubt that I’d got the right day, when the show finally started. “Looks like somebody’s taken a bite out of the moon”, I said and smiled to myself. Time to get to those pictures! In between pictures I took occasional looks through my binoculars, but what really fascinated me was the environment. The crisp shadows were slowly dissolving, and the stars were beginning to show! A few times I couldn’t help removing the camera and looking at M42, or a cluster or two. Don’t get much chance for that during a full moon!
Turtle! 22/01/2000
Hoo boy, did I have a sick DEC axis. I think I only began to notice it when I started guiding long-exposure shots as it was on the most part livable for the visual stuff.
I had a few problems:
None of this is very good when you’re trying to guide a photo on a guide star you can barely see, and I won’t even go into what an autoguider will try to do…
This happened to me on my 3rd night out with the LX50 and from what I’ve read elsewhere, it is a pretty common problem. In my case, some keys didn’t work, and the declination axis worked only in one direction. Don’t panic if this happens to you! All that’s going on is that a connector inside the hand controller has come loose.
If you open up the controller it should be pretty obvious what’s going wrong.
Remove the 2 screws on the back of the controller and pull off the back plastic panel. Inside you’ll find the circuit board connected to the front of the controller (where the keys are) by a blue connector. (Circled in red in the picture) This is what has come loose. Just push it back in, pop the back on, screw it in place and everything should be fine again.
I used some electrical tape over the connector and the back of the circuit board to keep it in place, and it has been fine since.
This one really spooked me. I was finishing up for the night with a quick look at Orion. I aimed, locked the RA and DEC, and noticed that with the RA locked I could move the scope in a left-right motion very slightly. More or less half a centimeter of travel. Yikes!
I took the scope inside and plonked it on the kitchen table with both the RA and DEC axis UNLOCKED. (This bit is very, very important! When you lay the scope on its side, you’re putting pressure on parts that weren’t make to take a lot of weight. If you have an axis locked you could force the scope and really break something.)
