Clear skies here have been pretty much non-existent for the past few weeks. I've been going through stuff out of boredom, and discovered I had 3 76/700mm reflectors.
The Towa has a nice wooden mount, it's great for what it is. The Tasco 3T has the same visual quality; it's just a re-branded Towa, but with a wobbly mount. Hmmmm.
The Skywatcher I'm not even sure when I got it, but the mirror was oxidized, and the secondary had a bent vane.
I took both the primary and secondary mirrors and mounting parts from the Tasco, cut the tube on the Skywatcher so my Canon T3 would come to focus, put the Tasco parts into the Skywatcher tube, and made a "tube ring" out of some metal brackets, a nail, bicycle cable clamp and some nuts.
Much like me
Pretty mickey-mouse, the home-made even pains me. But, solid on my CG4, and since I really didn't (and still don't) think a spherical mirror is going to work all that well, I didn't wan't to spend lots of money. All told, it probably has cost me a buck in welding wire and my time
Tonight was the first cold night we've had in about two months, and between the clouds it was somewhat clear. By cold, I mean below freezing, and tonight it's -13C (8F) without the wind chill. Time to throw a long sleeve shirt between the t-shirt and sweater!
So I took all this outside, and found M42 in the finderscope. However, looking through the camera viewfinder, I remembered I forgot to line the scope and viewfinder up together....!! OK, turn the Alt and Az knobs; there's some stars, is that it?
I don't have a motorized mount, so any pics I take are rough polar alignment, and manually turning the Azimuth knob, trying to keep a star in the same place in the crosshairs through the viewfinder. I took 7 exposures, but the only one that turned out was one at 6 seconds at ISO 1600. And as it turned out, it wasn't M42, but
I was surprised at the output, I actually expected it to be worse. It's certainly not an astrograph, but I'm curious as to what it would do with darker skies and better tracking/exposure times.
Or maybe I should just leave that curiosity alone
And that was my night. I was tempted to bring out a refractor for some visual, but not tonight. Tomorrow is supposed to be better visually, plus it's Friday!
Thanks for reading and all the best,