TheSkySearchers

I have an old Dell Latitude laptop that was designated for Observatory use but it needed upgrading. The drive was full and too small and the machine had become laboriously slow. So I installed a new 500 Gb SSD, cleaned everything up and got it ready to go out to the Obsy. Along with that I picked up a couple of ethernet extenders and set those up so that I would have internet out in the Obsy. Luckily for me, the Obsy power is taken from the house main board, so the extenders had no problem working. Also, I can finally use the docking station I got for this laptop. It is a convenient way to add six powered USB connections, ethernet, and serial port to this laptop. Works great.

All of this had to be done prior to getting the CEM 70 finally installed and ready for AP. You can't use iOptron's iPolar without hooking it up to a laptop. So night before last I hooked everything up, turned everything on, and everybody was talking to everybody, yippee. Next I started iPolar and after the second iteration it plate solved and told me that my guess for setting up this mount using my eyeball for North and the latitude adjustment on the mounted itself, notoriously inaccurate, and I was only 20 minutes away from the NCP.

It's always better to be lucky than good. 5 minutes later the CEM70 was polar aligned.

Had some clearing middle of the day today and was able to attempt to focus the iGuider which is the built-in guide scope and camera for this mount. It's located in the saddle itself so it could be very convenient, but it's only a 30 mm objective. That being said, it has the goofiest focusing mechanism I've ever seen. The camera is mounted inside a cylindrical hollow portion of the saddle in line with the little 30 mm objective.

Focusing is accomplished by moving the entire camera assembly forward or back within that cylinder to achieve focus. The problem I ran into today is that the camera would not budge within that cylinder. IOptron designed this setup so that you have metal on metal inside the cylindrical opening of the saddle. It has apparently galled. Now I have to figure out how to free it up to try to get some semblance of focus. It was close, but not really close enough.

Hopefully, at some point I'll have a clear night sky to test all this stuff out, finally. It's been months and months and months and I'm getting a might impatient.

More as it happens,

I was sitting in the obsy (on yet another cloudy day) and was thinking about how do I power my current winch versus just buying a new winch that already has a motor installed.

The winch is only used for the last 18" of closing the roof. If I close the roof all the way and then run outside to engage the lock, it has opened itself about 18". So the winch's hook is very handy because it allows me to hook onto the cable I installed between two of the handles on the leading edge of the roof. Because of my short stature and arms handicap reaching from the outside to close the roof that last 18" using my massive Hulk strength is nearly impossible for me. That's why I bought a winch.

Back to the solution of my problem of how can I motorize my current winch. Every now and then you get an idea that makes you say, "How did I not think of this long ago!" What if I took off the winch handle and just used my electric drill/driver on the worm shaft? So I grabbed my drill/driver and put on a 3/4" socket and removed the nut that holds the handle in place on the worm shaft. I then put the nut back on to give my drill/driver the hardware needed to power that worm shaft. So I closed the roof to the 18" point and attached the roof cable to the winch hook. I then went outside with the drill/driver with the 3/4" socket to see what it was capable of. I was convinced that it would not have enough torque to turn that shaft. I was pleasantly wrong, it had more than enough torque to close the roof all the way to the point where I could engage the roof lock.

Whoa, this was such a simple idea with massive return results. I'm actually giddy!

Here's a picture of the winch and another two of the setup in action.





And finally, a picture of springtime at the Obsy.


Cheers,

Very cool JT. Nice obsy, too.

wow love it , thx .