Category: Astronomy

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.

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.