Monday 15 February 2010


Here is a composite both were taken using my Megrez ED102 and a Toucam Pro.
The first one using an Astro Engineering x4 Imagemate
The second one using a Tele Vue x5 Powermate which is actually closer to x7 than x5

Sunday 14 February 2010






Well the new roll off roof observatory is now finished. Unfortunately I made a mistake in my calculations with regards to my 10" SN scope or light bucket as I call it.
When the mount and scope were assembled they wasn't enough room for me to get behind the scope to use the finder scope to check alignments when doing a 2 or 3 star setup. Bugger. So I had to revert to just using my William Optics Megrez ED102 and my Skywatcher ED80 scopes instead.
Its a real pity because I have looked through many different scopes and nothing I have viewed through can touch my 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain scope for deep sky fuzzies.
As you can see from the photos the 10" scope nearly fills the doorway so when the scope points south there is about 7" of room between the scope and the back wall of the shed.
As for rails I used Dex-ion. I didn't bother with wheels as the point of contact between the roof and the Dex-ion is just the thickness of the Dex-ion (approx 2mm) there is very little friction and the roof slides back and forward very easily.