I put the 16 inch scope together for the first time tonight. The six truss rods attach with bicycle clamps, collimation knobs and a power button for the fan at the top of the mirror box. I’m going to shorten the ground board legs and the truss rods a bit before I’m done. The six truss rods are connected to each other and as identical as I can make them. I need to add a bungee or something to keep them together while attaching. Plenty of fine tuning to do.
I’ve been doing mostly small stuff on the scope since the last post but today I made a couple of major steps forward.
I’m very close to first complete assembly but I didn’t want to mess up the contact cement by rushing it. After that will come the trimming of excess truss rod mentioned above, plus excess board for focuser and telrad, probably balancing. Truth be told the design doesn’t allow for proper balancing in advance. Hopefully it will be bottom heavy as that will be easier to address.
I was able to take these images of Venus and Mars Saturday night. The goal was Venus with Mars being way past its last opposition of about 9 months ago and now only about 3 arc seconds across.Venus on the other hand is close to one arc minute across and will only get larger for a few weeks before passing under the Sun and entering the morning sky. Venus was shot with a red filter and even so each frame was a quarter of a millisecond. It was the best 20% of 10,000 frames. Mars was best 20% of 5,000 frames with no filter and each frame was one millisecond. Last night Mars was about 6 magnitudes (or 225x) dimmer than Venus. Both were low in the west and seeing conditions were awful. Also seen but not imaged was Uranus, which was pretty close to Mars.
