Moon, Mars, and Venus 1/31/2017

Here’s a picture of the left to right from this evening. The Moon and Venus are, respectively, always the second and third brightest objects in the sky not counting occasional supernova. Mars on the other hand gets really bright for a couple months every two years and then fades to relative obscurity. So it is here. The Moon is about 500 times brighter than Venus and Venus is perhaps 100 times brighter than Mars right now. For this picture, I used a regular DSLR with a 300mm lens set to 6400 ISO and a 1/80th second exposure. That was the shortest exposure that showed Mars and while longer exposures showed the ruddy color of Mars they also blew out the Moon and Venus. So, I had to compromise.

The Molly Project continues…

The custom made secondary holder and spider should be here by month end.
I have 7 1.25” aluminum poles, one as a spare. May get one more if I have the opportunity to avoid cost of shipping.
Here is a prototype truss connector I made yesterday plus another picture showing it attached to a simulated upper ring with a cam latch. I’m hoping that will work, one of the scopes I’ve studied uses them and they will be very convenient. Finally a shot of all six. You can tell they are handmade and each is unique. Later I may revisit this but for now I’ve had enough of working with aluminum.  Fortunately I have enough aluminum channel (barely) to redo them.

The 0.4m (16″) compact dob, code named Molly, continues

Here we have a simple plywood disk mirror cell in the mirror box. there are 18 felt pads at the calculated points for support of the mirror.
Here I’ve cut out two 30″ diameter altitude bearings and matching rocker box sides from a single 2’x4’by3/4″ sheet of plywood.

Here we see the altitude bearings attached to the mirror box, resting on the rocker box with the mirror resting on its cell.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn
Share