10/28/2007, Magnolia Manor
On October 24th, Comet 17P/Holmes brightened suddenly from magnitude 17 to magnitude 2.5. Saturday night was clear in north Texas so I decided to try getting a picture of the comet. I set up my Televue NP 101 with my ST-237 camera using a flip mirror arrangement to center the image on the sensor. You can see the nucleus of the comet and the dusty halo surrounding it.
I am going to have to experiment some with the Meade Flip Mirror to get the camera and eyepiece at focus at the same time. I'll probably need to get a small extender to move the camera back about 1/4 of an inch to get both the eyepiece and camera into focus at the same time. The helical focuser on the flip mirror does not have enough inward travel to accommodate the eyepiece when the camera is in focus.
04/01/2007, Magnolia Manor
We had a few friends over for dinner tonight. We barbqued steaks and set the Televue NP101 refractor up to cool down while we ate dinner.
Since we planned on visual observation of planets and the moon tonight I didn't go through the usual stringent polar alignment routines I normally use so setup was pretty quick.
Dinner was the steaks, mixed vegatables, ice tea, and a visit to Marble Slab for ice cream! We all were bad and ordered big bowls of ice cream.
After dinner we looked at the Moon and Saturn then went inside and watch several SLOOH missons.
It was a pretty good time...
03/17/2007, Magnolia Manor
Here is a picture of my HD200C mount and Celestron C8 SCT. The mount barely notices that it has a scope attached! I have a JMI NGF-S focuser as well as a small motorized control for the main mirror focus. This makes it easy to image from the kitchen table in comfort.
The HD200C is really the mount for my big scope the "Behemoth" as my family has named it. It is a 17.5" newtonian that I built from the optical parts of a Celestron Dobsonian and new high quality Mirror Cell, Focuser, Aluminium Tube, and Spider. I learned a lot about my scope by rebuilding it. you can see a picture of it on my web site (Big Telescope)
It looks like the clouds are clearing off tonight so off to take more pictures!
