Using a mix of brands in a colour imaging train. Not as simple as you’d think.
The situation We have a client who has a ZWO ASI2600MC-Pro, which is a colour camera with an APS-C sized sensor. He found that he was getting flexure in his…
Read MoreCollimating a 400mm f/20 Classic Cassegrain
We all know that collimating a telescope that has multiple curved mirrors is Black Magic. I’ve tried it and I can happily confirm I am… not a witch.
Here’s a 400mm f/20 Classic Cassegrain. The primary mirror is a parabola and the secondary is a hyperbola. And if you do the maths, the focal length really is 8000mm!
The last stage of manufacturing for this monster was collimation. To do this, Catalin (definitely a wizard) set it up on a bench so it was facing a flat mirror on the wall opposite. Using an artificial star and a beam splitter, he sent a beam of light from the eyepiece, bouncing off the secondary, back to the primary, out to the flat mirror, back to the primary, then the secondary and through the beam splitter to the eyepiece. This allowed him to align the telescope on the bench first, and then to adjust the mirrors.
The scope has now been crated up and shipped off to its new owner in Europe.
Building a wide field deep sky imager for long exposure times
In this blog we put together a deep-sky, cooled camera and lens rig for wide-field autoguided imaging. We used components that fit together without having to drill new holes. This will go onto a go-to equatorial mount and give us long exposures with any camera lens. It also provides extra mounting points for autofocus motors, computers, or other components.
Encoders: what they are, do you need them, and if so, what type?
Now that Sidereal Trading is offering Paramount astrophotography mounts, we need to understand about the encoders that they use. Encoders are a way of telling your mount where it is pointing