My Scope, Then and Now

Here's the details of my setup through the end of 2016 and how it got that way over the past thirty years. I present it here as a look into the process of picking one's equipment so I'll talk about each scope 'system' and why I chose that particular piece and whether I'm happy with my purchase or not and things you might want to know before buying one of the items here for your own setup. I have included as many links to outside sources of additional information as I can think of in case you want a more thorough explanation or just want to dig deeper.
You'll also come to understand what a strange conglomeration of stuff you can end up with when you “heavily accessorize” over a few decades!

Details of my current setup are at the bottom of this page

Pre-Telescopic Era

Back in 1986 I met a guy named Mike Perry, a musician/computer programmer (you'd be surprised how common that is) who was the first real “amateur astronomer” I'd ever run into. I'd always been into the sky and had my Sears 2-inch refractor scope since I was a kid but I'd never really been able to find good sources of information about equipment that was above the toy/junk level that I had, but below the kind of stuff you'd see in the magazines for thousands of dollars.

Mike had a modest 6” in diameter scope, unmotorized but mounted equatorially with a knob you could turn with your fingers to compensate for the Earth's rotation when what you were working at rotated out of view. He helped me figure out what to look for equipment-wise and when I saw the kinds of things in the sky you could see with a decent scope I decided I needed a real instrument so I began scouring the local classified paper in search of something affordable that was “not junk".

Velvis

After wading though several weeks of Bushnell 2 1/4” refracto-garbage scope ads, sometime in early summer of 1986 I ran across an ad that read, “Edmund Scientific 8-inch Newtonian Reflector Telescope, photography ready $400”. This had had the ‘ring of truth’ to it and I was pretty sure this scope was different from all the others and I'd be buying it as soon as possible. Unfortunately the guy's work schedule didn't permit us to get together for several days but he said he'd hold it for me since I was the first call on the ad. The day finally arrived and he had the scope set up in his living room which also had a gigantic Velvet Elvis hanging on the wall! I flashed back to that song, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong…” but I digress.
One look told me this was the real deal and it took every bit of nerve I had to not just throw the $400 at him, grab the scope and run before he came to his senses. But I let him walk me through it all and it seemed solid enough. The mount was a little strange and he gave me some tips as to how it all went together.
So I got it home and took stock of it all. Good things: He had full manufacturers documentation including receipts saying that he had spent nearly $2000 on this scope, a full set of hex adjustment wrenches, power supply, joystick for guiding, extra felt pads, thumbscrews and the like. It also had an expensive factory add-on: an off-axis guider built into the main focuser. This is a focusing assembly that uses a“pickoff mirror” to siphon a bit of the incoming light off to a second eyepiece with illuminated crosshairs in it (called a reticle eyepiece) so you can center an object in there, and adjust the joystick to keep it there for long exposure photography, which at this time was still film based.
Not so good things: only one eyepiece, a rather cheap 28mm RKE (Rank-Kellner) design. There were some other lurking “not so good things” but they didn’t make themselves known to me until I became more skilled and ran into the limitations imposed on me by the mount.

My new 32mm eyepiece could now be 99x and with a nice big piece of glass to look through which is important if you wear glasses all the time like I do. Better yet, the the 15mm became 210x which is about as much as you want to push an 8-inch diameter scope before the image starts looking pretty smeary. This would be the closest view for planets while the lowest power views were good for open star clusters, galaxies, and the larger nebulae you look at. Power is over-hyped by scope advertisers for the most part although this is changing amongst the reputable manufacturers. If you see a scope that seems to be touting“high power” views up to 400x or around there but costs less than $500 you can be certain it’s garbage.
I also bought a filter for seeing emission nebula since I lived in Cincinnati and light pollution was a persistent problem. I chose the Lumicon UHC (Ultra High Contrast) Premium filter for $119. These filters rely on the the fact that light from most nebula is created by a certain physical process which results in their light emissions being confined to a few very specific light frequencies which this filter preferentially lets through and blocks pretty much everything else. I could have bought an“Oxygen III” (O3) filter which does essentially the same thing but the UHC seemed to be a little more flexible so I threw an extra Hamilton down to get it.
I also needed red flashlights, an accessories carrying case, and some sky charts which were 33 sheets of 20”x24” paper charts, white on black, and I needed them laminated because they would be out in the cold, dewey night air and you know what happens to wet paper… Remember that laptop computers didn’t exist at all in 1986 and paper charts on a table were the way to go back then. I don’t know if you’re keeping track or not but I think that’s about as much on accessories as I spent on the whole scope in the first place, a trend that would continue for, well forever!

Honeymoon Phase

As I put the scope into service a few things became apparent: The main mirror on the scope was exceptionally well made (also known as“figured”) for a hobbyist level scope like this, and that was great news. About this same time Mike bought a Meade LX-200 10-inch scope for $2000 and he would often say he liked my image better! If there’s one thing you need to be right, it’s the mirror.
On the negative side I decided I hated my finder scope. The crosshairs on the eyepiece were so thin you couldn’t really see them, and it was image reversed due to the mirror in the diagonal that the eyepiece went into. This meant that everything was backwards compared to the charts–East was West, Left was Right and it was a real pain to reconcile your chart against the sky and move from object to object when you would try and find something.
Remember, this was waaaaay before telescopes that could point themselves were on the market for amateurs except at the priciest levels. So the way you would find things was to star-hop from bright objects that you can see to progressively dimmer ones until your scope was pointed at that dim thing that you could only see through the full scope. Well this was really difficult when everything was backwards and I really didn’t know the sky all that well at this time anyway.
So I bought an image-correct finder scope (about $80) and figured out how to mount it on the scope which required drilling a few new holes in the tube. This made a huge difference in being able to reconcile the chart against the sky and I then started to get good at tracking down those“faint fuzzies” eventually completing my Messier Certificate for viewing all 110 Messier Catalog objects.

Phase II

That was about how my scope stayed for five years or so. Mostly I was doing skill building work; learning the sky, keeping track of interesting things to look at and remembering how to find them.
 

Polar (Alignment) is a Bear

Moving the mount east/west on the ground was difficult too; there were no fine controls, you just had to pick it up slightly and turn it (which is a problem if you have one of the legs propped up on something already for leveling, or kick the legs–hardly a precise adjustment.
So I made a number of photographic attempts with this setup knowing that I never even really got very close to perfect alignment but somehow managed to get a couple of not really ‘good’ but at least ‘encouraging’ photographs out of it; one of M51 the Whirlpool Galaxy and the other of the Double Cluster in Perseus which are still up on my wall in the ‘remember when?’ area. Sometimes you have to just go and fail to more precisely see what you’re up against.

If You Can’t Go-To, Then at Least Push-To

By now (1992) I was starting to see some of the computerized mount prices starting to come down as new models appeared so there was hope, but still way out of my hobby budget. I began to see something that might at least allow me to find objects ‘by the numbers’ instead of star-hopping which is a great aid when you’re doing stargazes for the public which was something I was beginning to enjoy doing a lot.
I contacted a company called Jim’s Mobile because I noticed that they made a box that, with proper input from encoders on each of the N/S E/W axes on the mount would tell you were pointed in the sky after you told it where you were on the Earth using Longitude and Latitude and telling it what day and time it was.
Problem was, they didn’t make an installation kit for my (now pretty ancient) mount but I asked them if there was something that could be done. They said they’d see what they could do and asked me to take a bunch of photos of certain specific places on my mount and they would craft a plan if possible. A week after getting them the photos they called and said that they thought they could help me out, but I needed to send them this one particular adjustment knob from the mount so they could attach something to it which I did.
So Jim’s sent back my knob, a couple of encoders with mounting brackets, modular telephone cablesand pulley belts, plus their NGC-MAX box along with instructions on how to attach the encoders properly and all that. I’m not super good with this kind of thing and I knew that this was a ‘get it right the first time or you’re really screwed” kinda situation so I went to the local family owned garage and showed them what was up and they said ‘Piece of cake!”. When they saw the mount for the first time their comment was something like,  “I want to see the gun that goes in that!” This was Kentucky after all…
So the way this system worked was that you entered some baseline data like the date and time, what longitude and latitude you were at and then you chose a couple alignment stars from a special list and manually tracked them down, hitting the “ALIGN” button when each was perfectly centered in the crosshair reticle eyepiece.
After completing this you could choose an object you wanted to view from the list and it would give you a “countdown” display in both the N/S and E/W axes as you manually moved the telescope in the correct direction. When the display read “0.0 – 0.0” you were pointed at what you wanted to view. Nifty! This was my standard setup until about 2006.
My deepest thanks to Jim’s Mobile for taking the time to craft a custom solution for me on this one; it’s hard to find people who will put themselves out for customers these days.

Balance is very important on a GoTo setup and the dovetail bar and scope ring setup allows you to slide the whole thing around until there’s a nice equilibrium to the whole assembly. The motors on these things are really not all that powerful, just accurate, so good balance is essential for precise pointing.
My first night out with the new rig was less than ‘stellar’ (ar ar) though. The mount ships with an eleven pound counterweight which is about right for the very compact 8 and 10-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain design scopes Celestron was figuring would go on there, not some 40 inch long Newtonian tube. My initial attempts at getting the mount to find things automatically was very disappointing especially considering the “sweat equity” I had invested in getting my scope on there in the first place. Not only weren’t the desired objects in the eyepiece field like they were supposed to be they weren’t even nearby so I knew there was something wrong since everybody online said that this thing was pretty good about pointing accuracy.
I did a little more reading and discovered that I probably didn’t have enough counterweights for the load I was placing it under so a quick trip to that bastion of astronomical hardware accessories Dick’s Sporting Goods(!) had me coming home with 10, 5, & 2.5 lb dumbbell weights and I started experimenting with various combinations and found that adding 15 lbs to the stock 11 pound weight produced a really fluid balance point. The next time out the mount worked perfectly and finally, I had the GoTo scope I had been wanting for 20 years!

The setup and alignment routines you have to follow with the GoTo mount are pretty precise so objects that are found ‘stay put’ a lot longer, 10 minutes or more!
Once the“honeymoon was over” with the GoTo mount I began to find times where it didn’t perform up to my expectations in terms of finding or tracking or whatever so I began to investigate online what would cause pointing and tracking errors. Turns out there were a couple things that would affect it in a major way. One was polar alignment; if you want really good automatic pointing you really have to have that one axis pointed at the north star. The other was that the tripod really needed to be level on the ground. This was easily accomplished by actually paying attention to the bubble level that was built into the mount, easy enough.
The polar alignment issue was a little harder to fix. What I had been doing to this point was basically to just set the mount on the ground and eyeball it for both vertical and horizontal placement but apparently that technique was just random enough to yield annoyingly unpredictable results. So the solution here was to buy a little scope that actually screws into a special spot in the north/south axis of the scope, called a “polar axis finder” scope. The CG-5 had a place for one of these but it wasn’t standard equipment so it was time to order one. $50 later I had it and it just screwed right into the mount.
This thing has a little picture superimposed on the lens that has a map of the Big Dipper on one side and Cassiopeia on the other with a circle in the middle. The idea is that you rotate your mount until the position of the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia on the polar finder scope are the same orientation as you see them in the sky. Then you adjust your mount on the ground and with the fine controls so that the North Star is inside it’s special circle in the polar finder. If you can do this with a good bubble level setup, you are very close to perfect polar alignment and the results are spectacular; since I’ve started doing this objects will stay put in the eyepiece for a half hour or more!

Going Pro–Becoming the ‘Sky Guy’

In the summer of 2015 I decided to move from Cincinnati to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, a frequent vacation spot for myself over the previous decades and by all accounts a decent place to live, especially in the winter! In doing the research about what kind of work I could pick up down here since my current career of music producer might not survive the move (it has) I wrangled an introduction to the activities coordinator at Marriott VacationClub’s Surfwatch property and pitched them on doing a weekly stargaze for their guests. They readily accepted when they heard my history and the events have been received spectacularly well by the resort attendees. All of a sudden, I was a ‘professional’ astronomer (of sorts) although I bill myself as an ‘Entertainer’ to distinguish myself from real professional astronomers who do real work to unravel the mysteries of the universe and how it ticks.
However I was getting paid which meant that everything I bought for the scope was now tax deductible! So I decided that I would do a few things to make viewing as easy as possible for the resort guests who aren’t used to looking through scopes really at all, and especially not really small, hard-to-look-through high power eyepieces. So I started by buying an inexpensive, low power wide field 56mm eyepiece for looking at big star clusters, the Andromeda Galaxy and the like. I also bought a fairly expensive ($100) 12.5mm eyepiece but with fairly large glass to look through that when combined with the barlow lens was capable of some quality high-power views up over 200x.
I was still missing that great combination of wide field and decent power and I the heard about the Meade Mega-Wide-Angle series 2” eyepieces that had an exceptionally wide view, big look-into opening and fairly high power at 15mm. Something like this isn’t cheap and to the tune of $200, it’s the most I’ve ever spent on an eyepiece. To pump this thing up some more I bought a 2” diameter barlow lens for about $90 which allowed a wide field, high power view like I had never seen before at 140x. The Hercules Cluster was a large brilliant ball of stars hanging in a wide field of space, remarkable and great for the guests to see. I now had a really complete set of eyepieces ranging from 9.6mm up to 56mm, 2x and 3x barlow lenses and it’s really gratifying to be able to put just the right combo together to get the right view for people.

Picture This

While I hadn’t completely stopped taking pictures in the previous years I did have to modify my choice of targets to things that my setup would accommodate, or at least not sabotage. So while long exposure photos through the scope had been impossible because of the polar alignment issues I was still able to mount a camera on the tracking scope mount and just point the camera at the sky (the Piggyback method) and open the shutter for up to 10 minutes and got some good wide field shots of the summer Milky Way, the entire constellation of Orion etc. While I was out at the Table Mountain Star Party in 2002 I bought a rig consisting of a 40mm eyepiece and adaptor ring that allowed me to attach my new digital camera (2.3 megapixel!!!) and shoot digitally some very short exposure “through the scope” shots of planets, especially Mars during the close approach of 2003.
Now that my whole polar alignment problem is under control and I’ve been wanting to take great astrophotos for over 30 years now it’s coming close to do or die (literally!) so I’ve made the final push and spent some real money on a new CCD camera setup. I’ll detail the specifics of the photography setup later in a separate blog post on the topic.
The single biggest obstacle to long exposure astrophotography is guiding accuracy, which comes about via a really good polar alignment setup. With my original mount I had a joystick that I could use to manually guide the mount N/S E/W when my target drifted a little. The problem was it was super easy to overcorrect and actually do more harm than good. I can’t tell you how many exposures I had to dump out of because of my own ham-handed manual guiding.
I can hear you saying,  “That was fifteen years ago; don’t they have machines to do that now”? Well the answer is yes, in the form of auto-guider cameras. These digital cameras are run by a little software program on your computer that looks at the camera image and sends instructions via a wire to the mount itself to keep the guide star perfectly still in the image. Well this sounded like a good deal to me and since they’re just for guiding and not the actual picture, some of the technical restraints are relaxed for something like this making them reasonable in cost, like $250. The deal though is that you can only have one thing looking through the scope at a time so the guider needs it’s own light source.
Remember, the focuser I have has a “pick-off” mirror that siphoned a bit of the light off to a 2nd eyepiece where you could do your guiding. So I figured I’d stick the autoguide camera there, no problem, ready made solution, right?  Wrong moosebreath! When I finally figured out how to control exposure and focus it became apparent that the auto guider was getting not one but three images from the pickoff mirror so I found out just exactly how useless this off-axis mirror was so now I’m hunting for another solution.
When I find myself in these situations I want the next thing I try to be an assured fix to the problem–no more half-baked solutions; let’s go straight to the problem and fix it. So a quick trip to Orion Telescopes turns up a short length, 4 inch in diameter scope that’s commonly used as a piggyback scope for the express purpose of autoguiding. A separate scope adds flexibility and the only thing needing to use the main scope is the actual imaging camera now. $120 later I have the autoguide scope, two scope mounting rings and a mount bar which I drill couple holes in so it will match some predrilled holes on the main scope rings.

Camera ObscurE

So the big decision was, what kind of real camera to buy. I had one of the old Orion “Starshoot” Color CCD cameras with an @ 250 x 250 pixel display but stupidly had lost the driver software for it and even more inexplicably, so had the manufacturer!!! So what to buy? I wanted something that was new technology. Santa Barbara Instruments Group was the brand leader in this department but their cameras with decent pixel counts were $2000 and up. I found a new product by a Chinese company, that had a maximum pixel dimension of over 3000 pixels in one direction and 2000 in the other, was coolable (keeps digital noise down), and had a fast communication speed by using USB 3.0. It was controllable by both Mac and Windows and was about $650 so it seemed like a bargain.
I can report that I've been able to get some understanding of how it all works and have made a few decent attempts at Moon shots which is your natural easy first target since exposure times are super short and you don't have to worry about stacking images. I had to deal with some of the other issues to get everything ready in the background so photography would be ready, and I admit there’s a certain amount of trepidation about having to learn a whole bunch of new stuff regarding exposure times for various kinds of objects ranging from bright (moon & planets) to dim (galaxies & nebulae). I’ll also need to learn how to stack multiple exposures on top of each other for the best contrast in images of dim galaxies and star clusters. More on this later as I untangle it all; I think the online forums are going to be a big resource here.

Losing My Focus

There were two downstream effects from putting the independent auto-guide scope on. First, my old finder scope was completely unnecessary now so I took its 90° diagonal and crosshair eyepiece and repurposed them in the new guide scope to act as a “total overkill visual finder” scope when I was doing sky tours and so removed the old finder since it was dead weight and you want to keep your rig as light as possible.
Secondly, since I no longer needed the off-axis part of the main focuser, and the main focuser had always been a little bothersome in that it was hard to really get focused exactly because the rate of travel was too fast and you’d zoom right past your focus point. Also there was this little rough spot in the metal rack & pinion track which always seemed to be where you wanted to be. It was also metal, huge and really heavy.
So I decided to replace the entire focuser with something better and lighter. A survey turned up a number of candidates from $79 to $450 based on load capacity, having dual rate controls and whatnot. I went with the $79 Crayford style focuser which turned out to be nice and smooth and was a little easier to manage around the focal point.

Getting the new focuser on there was going to be the most major modification to the actual scope itself I had done to this point, especially when I discovered that the hole in the side of the tube that lets the light from the secondary mirror out was too small for the barrel of the new focuser when racked all the way in. This was going to require taking my scope completely apart, more so than I had ever done before and I was thankful that the Newtonian Reflector design is so easy to implement and that maintenance and service are really quite straight ahead.
So after considering various approaches I decided that I would draw a new circle of the correct diameter and use a rough file to enlarge the hole to my desired dimension. My telescope tube itself is made out of 1/8” plastic so it only took about a half hour of elbow grease to get the hole to proper dimensions, doing test fits along the way to make sure I didn’t overdo it. The final result wasn’t exceptionally pretty but I knew that the base of the focuser would cover my little filing inaccuracies and keep stray light from getting into the tube. Once I had the hole fitted all I had to do was mark and drill four mounting holes and bolt it on there with the supplied hardware.
After cleaning the main and secondary mirrors and reassembling things it was time to do some testing to make sure that my attempts at 'improving' things hadn’t actually been a step backwards. The first test was balance and experiments revealed that the scope was now lighter at the front (the old focuser was this huge metal thing) so the balance point had shifted. The scope now needed to be slid more to the left when I placed the dovetail bar in the slot on the mount head which is also good because when looking at things near the zenith (straight up) the scope tube would sometimes bump into the mount legs causing a pointing error or the inability to get to certain objects; this would help with that!
I then needed to go through all nine of my eyepieces both with and without the barlow lenses to make sure they could achieve focus and what kinds of extension tubes and whatnot would be required to make that happen. So I set the scope up behind my car in the parking lot with the full moon glowing overhead and spent an hour looking at the moon from 18x up to a fairly useless 400x and came to the conclusion that the focusing extension tube I bought on a whim earlier that year was a smart choice. It turned out it was absolutely necessary for all eyepieces without a barlow lens in, and a big help when you were using the barlow.
What was going on was that the new focuser had a much lower profile which was good in a number of ways but the actual focal point of the converging light beam was farther outside the tube than the focuser could put an eyepiece so the extension tube acted as a “stand-off” to hoist the eyepieces up a bit higher into the focal plane. The action of the new focuser was silky smooth and slower than my original one so even though it was a lot of trouble, it was a good upgrade.

Holy Tube Repair!

After removing the old focuser, the completely new form factor of the new focuser left some pretty big open, now unused screw holes in the tube along with some other holes from the addition and removal of various finder scopes and whatnot over the years. One of the cardinal rules is “don’t let stray light into your telescope tube"–this was a situation that couldn’t be ignored anymore and I used some heavy black gaffers (duct) tape over the various holes in the tube, mostly because there wasn’t a formula of WD-40 thick enough!

More Computers Now!!!

So the scope and mount are now tracking well, the hand controller is finding things in the sky accurately, sometimes even with high power eyepieces in, so that’s the end of accessorizing right? Not a chance…
The thing about the hand controller is that it finds things when you know what you’re looking for. You have to know what it is you’re after and have the catalog number memorized so you can type it in. This is not really a big deal since I have thirty years experience in looking at the sky and you’d be hard pressed to put me down in front of any sky at any time of year and not have me be able to think of something to view where I know the catalog number from memory. And if I’m a little hazy on what the NGC catalogue number is of the 2nd component of the Double Cluster in Perseus is, there’s a sky map on my iPhone to look it up. This is fine but you end up looking at the same stuff over and over which is standard procedure for public stargazes but sometimes there’s really good stuff to see that you’ve forgotten about and need to have your memory jogged.
So the next logical step would to be able to look at a map of the sky on your computer, tablet or phone, see an interesting object on the map, select it and hit the GoTo button right on your phone and have the telescope slew to the new object without touching the hand controller at all!

Enter Sky-Fi…

SkyFi is a $199 rechargeable battery powered hardware box that is a combination of a WiFi router and telescope controller. It communicates to the scope through a data input port on the bottom of the NexStar hand controller and is findable as a WiFi source on any of your portable devices. It works in conjunction with the new SkySafari Software (available for both computer and portable devices) as well as the venerable StarryNight program from your computer.
This is really terrific (besides the off-the-charts ‘geek factor’) to be able to look at a map of the area surrounding M57, the Ring Nebula and be reminded that the nearby M56 is a really good globular star cluster to look at. Click and GoTo, awesome! This will really help with finding new, interesting things to view, without making anybody wait.

Wrap Up

Well that’s the story of me and my telescope over the years; not that I wrote all that because it’s all just so very fascinating to read but I hope it will be illustrative as to the kinds of things that are out there product wise and how you might employ them, and I tried to add lots of little tidbits of knowledge I’ve gained over the years that will help you as you get going in this fascinating hobby.

Good luck and keep looking up and wondering!

Bill the Sky Guy, October 2016

Addendum for 2020

New Scopes and accessories

Well I finally did it, after 31 years with the Edmund Scientific I bought a new telescope! Well, five actually. I decided that while I was still young enough to move such a thing around (and can still see!) I would finally own a large telescope. I had been seeing the same objects with the same scope for 31 years now so I decided to kick it up a notch; well, a couple dozen notches actually!

Obsessed? Well Maybe…

Around May of 2018 I purchased an "Obsession" 18 inch truss-mount Dobsonian telescope which gathers over 500% more light than the 8 inch did. Although it weighs 125 pounds assembled, it breaks down into three pieces for relatively easy transport. I found a guy within driving distance who was selling one of these used and decided to take the plunge.

Obsession scopes don’t come with tracking motors or GoTo functionality but there’s a third party company called RX Designs that makes the “StellarCAT” aftermarket motor package which is great but you have to install it yourself which required some woodworking skills right at the limit of my ability. I eventually got it in and working, it’s terrific!