Ad Astra Observatory

Veronica is now a Dob/Equatorial Newtonian!

I have been wanting to do this for years. I am forever sitting around on a nice night, camera cranking away on the mount shooting something, and wanting to spend a little time poking around at visual astronomy.

But, since I have pared everything down to just a photography rig, I only have one mount, so while the camera is using the mount, all I have are a pair of binoculars and a pair of Mark II eyeballs.

I had this idea in my head a while ago; since Veronica has top and bottom plates anyway, what if I just threw some Dob bearings onto the plates, and used, say, a 10″ Dob base? That would give me a working scope even when the photo mount is in use, and of course, since I’d just bolted the bearings onto the mounting plates, it would be easy to pop them back off and go back to using Veronica as an astrograph.

I had even figured out that maybe I could use Losmandy DA’s to make it really easy to get the bearings on and off.

I bought (or scrounged) a 10″ Orion Dob base several years ago, but never got around to working out the details.

Until today.

With my success last weekend at carving concentric circles with the CNC machine, I knew that I was on to something. Then I ran across the scrap circles that I’d created while trying to make a mirror cell for Betty all those years ago, and I had my answer.

A quick measurement of the altitude bearing seats on the Orion Dob mount (they’re 5″, by the way), a nail to hold down the 8″ plywood circles, and about 10 minutes in CamBam, and I was ready to roll.

I put some blue painter’s tape around the edge of the bearings, so they would slide better over the “furniture slide” material of the bearing seats. Someday I can replace with better material, but it’s working for now.

A little fiddling around with spacers ensued; it turns out that about 5 flat washers is the required spacing. I have all 5 on the same side of the scope, to make my life easier, but it would work just as well with 2 on one side and 3 on the other.

I spent a little more time fiddling with the balance point, but because of the DA’s, it was very easy to make sure that both bearings were in the same spot, once I found the perfect position. It’s very repeatable, and oh, so easy to remove the bearings when I want to put Veronica back on the NJP.

And it fits together very well, if I do say so myself.

I’ve been an astronomer for 7 years now, but this is my very first “definitely visual-only” scope. Welcome, welcome, Veronica-the-Dob. Don’t worry, you’re going to spend even *more* time under the stars now!