Stargazing @ Toa Payoh tonight -- 7 Nov 2011

[James Ling]

Just curious, did that photo show the modification done? I guess its adding another lens into the 8" achro?

Hi andeelym. No additional lens was added. It was cut into 2 for ease of transportation and storage. The interesting thing is most people (myself included) assume the collimation will be badly affected by doing this but James have proved otherwise with his design and approach to cut the OTA and assembling it back. The m45 stars were pinpoints and moons of jupiter perfectly resolved as round discs last night.

All.

My main purpose to cut the 6Ft long tube into two, so that it can be easily put inside my car.....
And this will make it possible for all future side walk......

Regards

James Ling

[Gary]

Some photos from last night's event.

[Gary]

Ooops. 2nd photo in the above post is a duplicate. Can't edit that now. Should be this:



And one more new photo:

[kaomoo]

oh mine! that's a big bugger!

is that a custom made?

[andeelym]

Just curious, why is the dovetail bar at the side instead of in the middle?

[James Ling]

Just curious, why is the dovetail bar at the side instead of in the middle?

The dovetail is on the bottom side , and not shown in this photo, when taken by Gary.

I mount a smaller dovetail on the top side is for carrying purpose..........

This photo shows the actual dovetail........ and beside this, there is a smaller dovetail that I used it for my 10" Mewlon.....

REgards

James

[kaomoo]

Just curious, why is the dovetail bar at the side instead of in the middle?

the objective probably weighs a ton...

[James Ling]

Just curious, why is the dovetail bar at the side instead of in the middle?

the objective probably weighs a ton...

Hi Kaomoo.....

This 8" F8.8 achro is not very heavy....

The bare OTA is just 45 LBs, simialr as the C14.

But the mounting rings and dovetail, is more than 15 Lbs.
the
With the focuser, diagonal, finder, and eyepiece, easily another 10 Lbs.

So at most the whole scope weighs around 70 LBs, which is the max loading capacity of the G11 losmandy mount......

REgards

James

[James Ling]

Hi All.

This is the short video clip I download into Utube....................

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYM0RLJw5ks

REgards

James

[Gary]

@James. Nice video! Embed it here:



Nice video capture from your Canon. Look brighter and better on a normal desktop monitor than on my lousy small phone screen when I first saw it. Even Jupiter was bright enough to be captured and shown in low res 360p mode at about 30 seconds into the video. Definitely worth the hours spent uploading it.

Just a comment about the question asked by the person during the video recording. Some of the Galilean Moons are bigger than our Earth's. I also just found out. We must be careful next time else kena arrested by the Science Police and force to learn to pronounce the names of all the other 60 known moons correctly and in ascending order according to their size. LOL!

This is a good illustration of the relative sizes of Moons in our Solar System. A very useful thing to show the public when doing future sidewalks.