Telescope Reviews: Biggest/bestest Carrion Telescope?

A little more detail about the first light (at my house), with this puppy.

Well, it LOOKS pretty good. I took it outside and aimed it at Jupiter.

First, I've got a small outdoor teak patio table that it fit right on. Nice and steady, too.

I plugged everything in, and turned it on. It tracks pretty nicely, but there is a modest amount of backlash in the drive. When I was at the seller's, I ran the hand controller. It was easy to see the dec motor worked, but I could only put my ear up to the fork and listen for the RA drive. It was running too. I thought I heard it change pitch when hitting the fast and slow RA buttons, but they don't do anything when I was trying to center on Jupiter.

The manual RA slow mo is very smooth, and not nearly as coarse as the one on my orange tube C-8.

Jupiter looked awful, though. Definitely something's out of collimation. I put one of my Point Grey cameras in the visual back (from my other 2045, this one had an integral star diagonal, and I wanted that out of the loop), and turned it on and turned on the reticle in Astro IIDC.

When Jupiter was centered on the screen, the secondary shadow was close to centered inside and outside focus. But as I approached focus, it was clearly not centered, and the donut was brighter on one side, then flipped onto the other side when I went through focus to the other side, and it warped through 90 degrees at the same time, indicating astigmatism.

My other OTA is nowhere near this bad. Someone said on the Meade LX5/6 yahoo group that they sometimes have crude secondary support castings that can prevent collimation. But can the secondary be off but still show a nearly concentric shadow?

Anyhow, that's it so far.

It came with a camera t-adapter with a Nikon bayonet mount, a 9mm and 25mm MA Meade eyepieces, and a nifty camera piggyback bracket attached to the bottom of the OTA.

There's a 2045 manual dated 1985, and a Supplementary 2045/LX3 manual that I've never seen before.

I'm going to try to take a look at the innards of this thing sometime over the weekend or next, to see if there's anything obvious that would account for so bad an image. If it's the optics, I may swap them for my spotting scope's optics, as those are decent, if not earth-shattering.

The mount is surprisingly solidly-built. Makes it a bit on the heavy side, but still something I could imagine taking on a plane with me. One idea I've been toying with, would be to see if a 4" ETX Mak OTA might be adaptable to this mount? Even slight mods to accomodate a slightly larger tube (5" ETX?) seem possible, as the fork arms bolt on, so adapters could be made...

But, first things first... I want to see what I can do with the SCT alignments and the HC RA buttons, first.

-Tim.

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"We`re just waiting looking skyward as the days come down.
Someone promised there`d be answers, if we stayed around."
-Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, "The Romance of the Telescope"