Ad Astra Observatory

Epiphany is a wonderful thing.

You thrash around for a long time, trying to figure out the solution to a wooly problem, and then all of a sudden, it comes to you.

Trixie’s Dob bearings were jumping off the rails of the rocker.

And I finally hit upon the solution. And it was dead simple.

A few minutes with a miter box, and Trixie suddenly had new sideboards to keep the bearings from sliding off-track. I added the furniture glides as well, and suddenly, Trixie’s altitude motion problem was solved. It was exhilarating.

The altitude motion was so easy that I immediately discovered that, as I suspected, the scope is a little nose-heavy. So I Velcroed a counterweight to the back of the mirror cell, and that solved the problem.
The movement in altitude is just smooth. In fact, it’s smooth enough that the azimuth movement now feels a little jerky. I’ll have to loosen the pivot bolt a little and see if I can fix that.

At this point, the complaints about scope performance turned into quibbles. Yes, I could add felt here to stop some rubbing, the poles could use insulation because they get cold, that kind of stuff. But the scope. just. works.

I spent a little time cruising around with the new rig. I visited a few new sites from the Winter and Spring sections of _Star_Watch_. I visited M36/37/38, M78, M65/M66, M51, and split Beta Monocerotis at 47x. Star hopping is still a bit unnatural to me. I like being able to find things by seeing where lines between major stars cross near the object. Maybe I’ll write my own book. 🙂 I did not find M101, M97, M63, M94, M3, or NGC 2903.

The spring galaxies are *dim* compared to the winter nebulae, even when they are high in the sky. It took a *long* time to find M65/66, but once I did, I was able to find M51, which I’d spent a lot of time hunting for, but hadn’t found on the first try.

The light pollution is horrid around my house. Between neighbor’s lights and the unshielded mirror, I really took a beating trying to find fuzzies. I am certain that if I hadn’t moved on to photography, I would have stopped doing astronomy very quickly. Carting off to a dark-sky site on a random Tuesday would not really happen with small kids, and there’s not a lot to see from my backyard, even with a big yard cannon like Trixie. Sure, we’ll see how she does once the shroud gets built, and there’s a lot to be said for dark adaptation and, frankly, becoming a better observer. But I continue to be convinced that photography is the way to go as a suburban astronomer.

I’m looking forward to getting the NJP back to see how Trixie performs under duress. But I’ll keep using the Dob mount until it does. There’s cool stuff up there.

And it’s very nice to have a scope that just… works. Very cool.