Trading for an electronic mount

weedee · Post by **weedee** » Mon May 01, 2006 10:48 pm

Hey, can I have some opinion on this? Our school club intends to trade in 2 5-inch meade (EC-125) for an electronic mount which can be fitted to our C8.

The original plan was to fix one of Meade. (The second one might be fixed when we have the budget or most likely left to collect dust in our cabinet as it had done so all the while.) Our C8 can still be mounted on an old GP vixen mount.

The club agrees that we should just stick to one C8. Our teacher is sort of fine with it, however, the school wishes to justify the trade in and play safe so I'm sort of tasked to ask around from those in the know.

Thanks.

Jia Wei
VJC Astronomy Club

mrngbss · Post by **mrngbss** » Tue May 02, 2006 6:24 am

Dear Jia Wei,

I'm not for trading in, and I do not know the amount of stores you have.
I feel that you should have the your Meade scopes fixed (despite the cost). I feel that your club's vision is to promote astronomical viewing to as many poeple as possible. In order to facilitate more people to be able to enjoy viewing at the same time, it is important to have more scopes.

You can have more club members learn to operate the scopes at the same time. You can have more club members looking at the same object at the same time. What if you want to conduct starparties for your friends? they will not need to wait too long and have too short a time to enjoy the night sky. They will tend to enjoy more. Once they like it, your club will have achieve your goals.

I would suggest that you actively promote Astronomy to other schools. Ask to go out of schools to teach others. Teach the primary schools. They learn Solar System in Primary 5. Show them the stars and planets. This can add about 5 hrs of CIP everytime you do it. Your school will be most happy to allow that. Doing these will provide greater justification to why you will need more funds to upgrade your equipment.

I also suggest that you ask your teacher in charge to request for cluster funds to get a new computerised mount. I'm not sure how your cluster works, but it is one way to get more funds. Getting more school funds is unlikely, unless your teachers has put in a budget already. You may want to check. A computerised mount is most important as it provides a faster way of introducing objects to people. You can also wait till October and persuade your teacher to propose the budget(to make new purchases) for next year.

I was advised by my school administrator not to do trade-ins as the audit will query and it is NOT easy to justify. The dollars and cents doesn't help. There is no need to help the government save funds, as all these purchases are for student learning. No other reasons beats that.

I'm a teacher who promotes astronomy among schools actively too, and I help take care of CCAs.

Post by **zong** » Tue May 02, 2006 8:18 am

Hi, in the first, place, why do you want to upgrade yourself to an electronic mount? IMO, a GP mount is more than enough for your C8 to show views to your club. Granted, it's quite irritating that you have to "refresh" the view every 3-5 people look through the eyepiece, but I think unless your club is given alot of money, every other school astronomy club here is facing the same "refresh" problems as you. Audits in school are so strict it isn't worth your time presenting this proposal for a trade, the office might not even consider after you put in so much effort...

Sorry to be such a wet blanket haha.. I was one of those who help my club "refresh" views and find objects last time, i understand your anguish, but Singapore doesn't give enough emphasis to astronomy. Since we love looking at the sky, we have to make do with what we have.

I also agree with "laoshi" that you should instead buy another mount and train more people who know how to use scopes to help. In my experience, while 1st scope shows objects, 2nd scope can find object, and vice versa, and this will sustain the club people's interest, rather than having them ALL do nothing when the one and only scope is trying to find objects. ;)

Post by **acc** » Tue May 02, 2006 10:51 pm

Hi Wee Dee
Can you describe what is wrong with the ETXs' fork mounts? If its some simple problems, I may be able to help fix it (for free).

cheers
cc

weedee · Post by **weedee** » Wed May 03, 2006 11:02 pm

Thank you all for your opinions.

The ETX mounts have a damaged/cracked gear for its vertical motion. It's probably due to bad usage cause when my seniors passed down to me, they were using it without the Autostar and manually loosening and tightening the knob.

Funds are hard to come by because the club has very low profile and one of the smallest (perharps even the smallest since we only had 4 members last year) in the school. Plus, funds usually go to the core CCAs that have better "value"

Our rationale for sticking to one scope was because the other 2 scopes are smaller anyway so why not just use one 8-inch, and allow Autostar to do all the finding for us? Besides, we usually stick to one scope per session, so we never thought about it.

Telescopy skills are hard to hone especially when our stargazing sessions are short. We tend to just view only planets through the scope that and the rest is basically naked eye viewing with explanations and all.

We have yet to really "explore" out of the school this year. Hopefully, we will start the outside activities after June when we have more time instead of rushing the topics for the compeitition.

Well, I'll let my teacher know about it.

Thanks all.

Post by **Airconvent** » Wed May 03, 2006 11:11 pm

looking at your financial situation, you would have 2 options. buy Vincent's N5 which is value for money or bring your scope to Wee Kiong from Physical Space and see if he has the spare parts to fix it. If the cost of repair is lower than the N5, then the ETX should be saved since its a pretty good scope.

Otherwise, cheapest option is to remove the ETX OTA from the damaged fork mount and place it on a Manfrotto 410 head + tripod. Cost should be around $300 if you go for this solution or lesser if you manage to get a second hand set...

cheers

Post by **acc** » Wed May 03, 2006 11:17 pm

Hi Weedee
$2500 seems like an exorbitant price to pay to fix a damaged/cracked gear. Since I guess the school must have bought from an authorised dealer, have you explored the possibility of having the dealer do a repair or replacement of the declination drive? Sometimes got to push the dealers a little

Otherwise I wonder what the dealer is doing besides charging an arm and a leg, for Meade itself does not charge so much to do a repair. If you really have no other option, let me take a look at the scope(s); it may be an easy fix or parts can be salvaged from one scope to fix the other.

I also second Rich's recommendation of removing the OTA and fixing it on an alt-az mount, but I recommend the astroslew mount instead. Than, there would be no more goto mounts to breakdown

Canopus Lim · Post by **Canopus Lim** » Thu May 04, 2006 12:18 am

Or .. you could have a 8 inch fully functioning dob with some accessories for 600 bucks.

That would just beat all your 5 inch scopes.

mrngbss · Post by **mrngbss** » Thu May 04, 2006 8:12 am

weedee wrote:Thank you all for your opinions.

The ETX mounts have a damaged/cracked gear for its vertical motion. It's probably due to bad usage cause when my seniors passed down to me, they were using it without the Autostar and manually loosening and tightening the knob.

Funds are hard to come by because the club has very low profile and one of the smallest (perharps even the smallest since we only had 4 members last year) in the school. Plus, funds usually go to the core CCAs that have better "value"

Our rationale for sticking to one scope was because the other 2 scopes are smaller anyway so why not just use one 8-inch, and allow Autostar to do all the finding for us? Besides, we usually stick to one scope per session, so we never thought about it.

Telescopy skills are hard to hone especially when our stargazing sessions are short. We tend to just view only planets through the scope that and the rest is basically naked eye viewing with explanations and all.

We have yet to really "explore" out of the school this year. Hopefully, we will start the outside activities after June when we have more time instead of rushing the topics for the compeitition.

Thanks all.

Hi, I would like to encourage you to explore outside school. I'm willing to combine 'forces' with you. Grant yourself the mobility.

I encourage you to challenge the norms than "usually the norms". It will be good learning for all of you and friends.

Do not be disheartened and feel "less value". Every CCA has great value, we need to have a vision and bring what we want closer to our hearts.

mrngbss@mac.com

WeeNghee

mrngbss · Post by **mrngbss** » Thu May 04, 2006 8:14 am

Airconvent wrote:looking at your financial situation, you would have 2 options. buy Vincent's N5 which is value for money or bring your scope to Wee Kiong from Physical Space and see if he has the spare parts to fix it. If the cost of repair is lower than the N5, then the ETX should be saved since its a pretty good scope.

Otherwise, cheapest option is to remove the ETX OTA from the damaged fork mount and place it on a Manfrotto 410 head + tripod. Cost should be around $300 if you go for this solution or lesser if you manage to get a second hand set...

cheers

Good suggestion. However, schools cannot purchase second-hand items.

I like the idea of converting the ETX OTA to using other mounts.

Cheers.