174 replies to this topic

[rolo]

Anyone still using one of these? I stil use mine with C8 forks, Unitron 152, and the old Dynamax 8. Use to use one with my old Cave and Parks Superior Mounts.  I'm holding on to this one cause they're getting harder to find. 

 

Post a picture of yours!

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Edited by rolo, 09 March 2018 - 07:57 AM.

[TOMDEY]

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

 

 

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[deSitter]

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

That parasitical guider is amazing!

 

-drl

[Jim Davis]

Our club has 2. One on our 17" Cassegrain, and one I just removed from our 10" Cave. I removed it due to the motley collection of wiring.

 

[rolo]

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

That's an awesome set up and with autoguided film shots! You wouldn't have any pics taken with it would you?

[rolo]

Our club has 2. One on our 17" Cassegrain, and one I just removed from our 10" Cave. I removed it due to the motley collection of wiring.

 

IMAG0760.jpg

That one looks well used. I see four holes on the top of the corrector so it must have been bolted to something.

Edited by rolo, 09 March 2018 - 09:29 AM.

[Jim Davis]

 

Our club has 2. One on our 17" Cassegrain, and one I just removed from our 10" Cave. I removed it due to the motley collection of wiring.

 

IMAG0760.jpg

That one looks well used. I see four holes on the top of the corrector so it must have been bolted to something.

 

Yes, the bottom of the mount.

 

[TOMDEY]

 

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

That's an awesome set up and with autoguided film shots! You wouldn't have any pics taken with it would you?

 

Hi, rolo, yes... many hundreds of multi-hour exposures on TP2415 film. A friend is scanning the negatives now. Some (most?) came out great... for film. Horsehead, Veil, Rosette, galaxies and galaxy clusters... Some appeared in books by Dickenson, Eicher, Berry... Attached a snippet ~quote~ from Terry's |The Backyard Astronomer's Guide| 1st edition, 1991. It occasionally appears for sale here, AMart and can be acquired on AbeBooks website. I highly recommend that original version, nostalgic... pretty much pre-solid-state image capture and plug-n-play autoguiding!  GOD, DS imagery was difficult back then! Tom

.

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[John Higbee]

 I have one - it came with the Celestron C-14 Orange Tube I got in 2014. Really like the joystick control it provides!  Only problem is that the manual for the corrector is nowhere to be found...last one appears to have been destroyed in the Great Library of Alexandria fire. 

 

[John Higbee]

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

Tom - I have to bow to you... 

 

If you got all those scopes, focusers, etc onto the OTA, and still got good tracking out of what looks to be a Cave mount with 1.5" axes, I (for one) would really like to get your tips on how to do it, since I have one of those beauties.

 

John

[tim53]

 

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

Tom - I have to bow to you...

 

If you got all those scopes, focusers, etc onto the OTA, and still got good tracking out of what looks to be a Cave mount with 1.5" axes, I (for one) would really like to get your tips on how to do it, since I have one of those beauties.

 

John

 

I bet the Byers drive made all the difference in the world.

[TOMDEY]

 

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

Tom - I have to bow to you...

 

If you got all those scopes, focusers, etc onto the OTA, and still got good tracking out of what looks to be a Cave mount with 1.5" axes, I (for one) would really like to get your tips on how to do it, since I have one of those beauties.

 

John

 

Hi, John... that was their super-beefy mount with the 2.5-inch solid steel shafts! I had it heavily-loaded, but perfectly-balanced in all degrees of freedom. And in a dome. The thing locked onto a guide star like a bulldog, the guiding sensor feed was off-axis main scope with mild Barlow... guiding focal length 2000+ mm. Had he been an astronomer, Crocodile Dundee would have said, "Now THAT's a guider!"  Tom, ~one sub, 300 min~ Tom

[rolo]

 

 

I had one like that on my old 12.5-inch Cave Astrola. I had added a nice Byers 11+-inch RA drive, so the scope tracked magnificently. I remember having to understand the wiring output and make my own connectors. I also had the old SBIG ST-4 Star-tracker, one of the very first that worked wonderfully. Honest, I would leave the observatory, and return 2 or 3 hours later, with ONE Exposure on film, tracked to sub-arc-sec! That scope was great for imagery. I eventually sold it off to go onto (Yikes-Bigger!) other scopes  Tom

.

That's an awesome set up and with autoguided film shots! You wouldn't have any pics taken with it would you?

 

Hi, rolo, yes... many hundreds of multi-hour exposures on TP2415 film. A friend is scanning the negatives now. Some (most?) came out great... for film. Horsehead, Veil, Rosette, galaxies and galaxy clusters... Some appeared in books by Dickenson, Eicher, Berry... Attached a snippet ~quote~ from Terry's |The Backyard Astronomer's Guide| 1st edition, 1991. It occasionally appears for sale here, AMart and can be acquired on AbeBooks website. I highly recommend that original version, nostalgic... pretty much pre-solid-state image capture and plug-n-play autoguiding!  GOD, DS imagery was difficult back then! Tom

.

 

  I knew your name sounded familiar, now I know why! That was one my favorite books when I got back into Astronomy back in 1994. That's an amazing shot and 5 hrs long at the time had to be a record.!

[rolo]

Here's the only guided shot I've done with 12.5" f/6 Cave, Parks Superior Mount with an Optic-Craft Drive and a JMI Mototrak 3. The hand controller on the JMI unit had an ST4 type phone jack guide plug. Still, it wasn't easy! Its an HA, RGB combo with an HX916CCD guided with a Meade DSI and Shoestring adapter  using PHD software. I think the HA was 3 min subs and 2min for RGB captured and processed with  Astroart 3.0.

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Edited by rolo, 09 March 2018 - 01:24 PM.

[TOMDEY]

Here's the only guided shot I've done with 12.5" f/6 Cave, Parks Superior Mount with an Optic-Craft Drive and a JMI Mototrak 3. The hand controller on the JMI unit had an ST4 type phone jack guide plug. Still, it wasn't easy! Its an HA, RGB combo with an HX916CCD guided with a Meade DSI and Shoestring adapter  using PHD software. I think the HA was 3 min subs and 2min for RGB captured and processed with  Astroart 3.0.

Very cool... and there's the Pulsar! PS: I will strobe it using the 36. If I can't SEE it strobing, next step will be to involve a radiometer and record a nice, long temporal intensity stream... (convolved with/by the chopper), then do a power series on the data to look for spikes around 30-ish Hz and its harmonics. Would expect the 1st harmonic to be reasonably strong and noticeably out of phase with the fundamental. And then other harmonics to account for the structure in the fundamentally-repeating signal. And... ummm I'm working on a custom design to the chopper blade to maximize the product of signal strength and modulation... that should (theoretically) maximize the (desired) information content aka maximizing the chance of being to successfully nail the pulsar as what it is. Like everything I ~gravitate toward~ It's a LONG SHOT! My m.o. has always been trying to do impossible stuff. Made for a good career, before semi-retirement! I fondly recall my boss once said, "Tom... you would do this stuff regardless [of whether it's your work or not]? My answer was... "Ummm... probably..."  She was perceptive.  Tom

[Chuck Hards]

Astro Physics Model 8002 DA drive corrector with Model 7002 Autoguider.   Original owner.

 

 

 

A couple of Accutracks, I bought the one on the left around 75, 76.

 

 

 

This Sidereal Electronics unit came with my Cave 10" Custom Super Deluxe.  

 

 

 

 

All of these still get used.

 

 

 

[rolo]

 Wow, that's a nice collection. Man, you certainly hold on to your equipment. Love tha AP model, that was pretty awesome in its day!

[starman876]

Astro Physics Model 8002 DA drive corrector with Model 7002 Autoguider.   Original owner.

 

AP 001.jpg

 

 

A couple of Accutracks, I bought the one on the left around 75, 76.

 

Accutrak 001.jpg

 

 

This Sidereal Electronics unit came with my Cave 10" Custom Super Deluxe.  

 

Sidereal Electronics 001.jpg  Sidereal Electronics 002.jpg

 

 

All of these still get used.

you are getting older which each picture

[rolo]

Here's one my favorite set ups. Like a 50's SciFi movie prop!

 

Top is the RA

Center box is the Dec control

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Edited by rolo, 10 March 2018 - 08:46 AM.

[rolo]

Here's the scope it was from. A 10" Cave Cass.

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[rolo]

Did Unitron ever offer a drive corrector?

[deSitter]

Funny Rolo, I recognized the scope just from that first pier pic That setup was the height of equipment lust in the day!

 

-drl

[tim53]

Here's one my favorite set ups. Like a 50's SciFi movie prop!

 

Top is the RA

Center box is the Dec control

Thanks for the pic. The only thing my cave dk is missing is the dec control box!  I have the other two Astro lab boxes. 

[deSitter]

Here's the scope it was from. A 10" Cave Cass.

Just a magnificent beast - hope it performed/performs!

 

-drl

[rolo]

 

Here's the scope it was from. A 10" Cave Cass.

Just a magnificent beast - hope it performed/performs!

 

-drl

 

It was going to be my main planetary scope but it needed some work....The Royce touch would have perfected it.

Edited by rolo, 10 March 2018 - 10:58 AM.