Howard,
I enjoyed your comments about the marathon. You should write a book: "The wacky
adventures of an amateur astronomer", and cover everything from observatory
roofs that open and close randomly, to moths in the guider and intermittently
loose motors. I'm reminded of the old Gilda Radner skits on SNL where she
played the part of Rosanne Rosannadanna. She'd describe some situation that got
more and more out of hand, and then end by saying "You know it's either this,
or it's that, ...but it's always something"
Paul Lind
----- Original Message -----
From: Howard Anderson <handy13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: sac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: sunnysusan@xxxxxxx
Sent: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:43:46 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [sac-forum] Enjoyed Messier Marathon
Hi,
Just want to say I enjoyed the Messier Marathon!
Great weather Saturday night!
I mentioned to a few of you out there that I was having
pointing problems with my Meade LX-200 f/6.3 scope. Thought you might
like to know what I found. I had thought the problem was due to
an angle adjustment needed between the fork arms. Spent a couple
of days prior to going out to the Messier Marathon site to work on
that with my son-in-law. Pretty much thought we had corrected that.
I also created a way to mount an F/6.3 focal reducer in front of the Optec
Temperature Compensated Focuser and it worked and there was enough
focus travel of the main mirror in the telescope to allow focus! Plate
solves indicated that I was operating at f/3.5 which gave my ST-4000 XME
camera a 59' by 59' view field, almost 1 Degree by 1 Degree!
I thought that surely now each object would be SOMEWHERE in the
image field of view.
Did testing Thursday night and still had a problem with objects not being
in the camera view field! Darn! Made one more slight tweak to the
fork arm angle during the day Friday...
Lots of wind Friday night out at the site prevented me from doing
any further testing that night. Darn!
Then I had a lot of trouble getting USB/Serial devices to install
on my laptop machine.. Finally got things working well enough for
Saturday's operations. (I am home now rebuilding Win 7 on that machine
which seems to somehow have developed an operating system problem
with respect to USB installation operations.)
Saturday night was last chance. The HandyAvi software that I wrote that
automates taking images of all the Messier objects in one night worked
perfectly.
Took pictures all night long. Less than half the images were in the frame.
I can only claim getting 42 images for the 2016 Messier Marathon... Darn!
(Did better in 2011 when I automatically imaged 108 objects.
http://www.astroshow.com/MessierMarathon/MessierMarathonImages.html)
Then early Sunday morning, when I was getting ready to take everything
down, I noticed that there was play in the Right Ascension axis! Wish
I had noticed this earlier- like more than a year ago...
I thought that maybe the spring that pushes the motor's worm gear
against the main gear to make sure they stay engaged might have been
missing. It wasn't... It was worse... :-)
When I got the scope home, I took off the bottom cover to access the
RA motor and found that the two bolts that hold the motor in place
were loose! That motor has a worm gear that is supposed to stay
engaged with the main gear. There is a spring to make sure it stays
engaged... When the motor is loose, the scope is fine as long as it
is pointing to something near the meridian. The scope gets almost 1 degree
out of alignment if the motor is loose since the weight of the scope
pushes the main gear which pushes the motor and thus the worm gear
to wrong positions when the scope is pointed to something towards the
East or West.
I am pretty sure that I had never accessed that motor
in that scope before. The previous owner must have been in there
messing with the motor and forgotten to tighten the bolts.
I think I tried to use that scope for the Messier Marathon in 2015
and had dismal results but didn't know why. Thought it was the
adjustment of the angle between the fork arms and that's why
my son-in-law and I tried to correct that angle in anticipation
of this year's Messier Marathon.
Maybe next year I will have my scope under control and get
better results. :-) Will be doing more pointing testing in the
next few weeks...
Anyway, it was nice being out in the desert with good friends,
acquaintances, and new friends!
Thanks,
Howard
