LX10 SCT Collimation Test

 11/16/2024 -- Set up the venerable Meade LX10 SCT at prime focus with the Svbony 405cc with a 1.25" UV/IR cut filter. Centered on Hamal in Ares close to zenith and used AstroDMx-Capture directly connected to the camera to capture a range of defocused star frames to examine collimation.  Results suggested no adjustment is likely needed...despite the fact that the OTA has never been collimated since I've owned it! Examples:














Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First light: Baader Planetarium Rowe Triplet Coma Corrector for Newtonians - RCC-I

Image
Goal: install, configure & test out the Baader Planetarium Rowe Triplet Coma Corrector - RCC-I on the Orion CN10 (long tube) 10" Newtonian.   This is an attempt at replacing the Teleview Paracorr (type 1) since my example is ancient, hazy (smoky...amber colored...ich) and results in a 15% increase in focal length.  Early testing with my example paracorr suggested similar light throughput as the (deforked) Meade LX10 EMC 8" with a 0.63x focal reducer (which is sad). A key challenge with the RCC-I in this Newtonian is the focuser.  It comes with a T-adapter...and an eyepiece adapter...neither of which work with this 2" coma corrector...because it needs to go _into_ the focuser.  Sadly, the eyepiece adapter for the focuser brings the camera too far out... and the T-adapter provides no mechanism to mount the coma corrector.   This was confirmed on the first night...which resulted in no images... with no mechanism to reach infinity focus.  Had...
Read more

NGC 4438 / M106

Image
 03/20/2024 -- Clear skies but enormous moon.  Switched to the venerable Orion ST80 singlet with the dual narrow-band filter in hopes of getting collection against emission nebula.  This was not to be... but was able to set up the OTA, get it into focus with the SV405cc (in preparation for the 04/08 eclipse) to include the finder and grab some light frames for a quality check.  Ended up collecting frames over a range of (too small) and highly inappropriate targets (for this OTA/filter combination) centered on NGC 4438 with M87 and M88 in the field of view. Indi Allsky camera pseudo sky quality metric for 03/20 - 21 showing poor values (15k where 5k is good). Indi Allsky star counts for 03/20 -21. Forecast from meteoblue for 03/20-21 with giant moon. Forecast from cleardarksky showing anything but for this evening. Started collecting 120s light frames at a gain of 120 with offset 5...but moved to 180s after examining the first few light frames in ASTAP and they appear...
Read more

IC 5146 & IC 405: Narrowband Test with Starizona SCT Corrector III

Image
 10/21/2024 -- Clear skies but a big moon (79%) coming up at 22:30 motivated an experiment with the dual narrowband (Ha/OIII) filter on the LX10 with the Starizona SCT Corrector III and the Svbony 405cc. Seeing forecast from cleardarksky for 10/21/2024 showing clear skies, good transparency but bright moonlight. Seeing forecast for meteoblue showing similar trends. Spend 1.5hr polar drift aligning... painful...back and forth. Then spend 30 minutes on focusing...with the dual narrowband filter in place. Then searched for bright nebula still visible despite trees from the back deck. Settled on IC 5146 (Cocoon Nebula). Started the internal autoguider... which calibrated fine...and began 180s test image. Created a job in the Indi/Ekos scheduler for IC 5146 with 180sx20 at 5C, gain of 285 and offset 32 in a sequence file to repeat until 05:30. Promising initial result -- one light frame (180s x1) with gain 285, offset 32, temp at 5c stretched in the Indi/Ekos FITS viewer. Collection of ...
Read more