Finished Repairing The Telescope

Gads, it's 4:18 a.m. of Saturday morning. I spent the whole darn night fixing up the telescope so hopefully we can observe in Caliraya tonight with ALP.

I cut off the hacksaw blades at the right length (hacksaw blades are hard -- the Dremel with cutoff wheel had quite a time going through them, lots of sparks flying and stuff). I also got some black plastic folders to use as upper-cage shroud (total cost 40 pesos).

On a side-note, Blogger has some pretty annoying image upload bugs, at least when using Firefox. Typical of them.


After I shortened the mirror box and rocker box, the whole thing has become top-heavy. And a 10-pound barbell weight can't be bolted to the underside of the mirror box, because the collimation bolts get in the way. But, even a 5-pound barbell weight (I have lots of these! you'd think I'd have buff biceps by now..) when on top of the mirror box (on that white putty material part) is imbalanced: it's not enough to counterbalance the upper cage at low altitudes, but at high altitudes it's too heavy and forces the dob to vertical.

So I went back to using a cheap door spring. Which I bought in Lingayen two to three years ago for the first iteration of this dobsonian.

And what do we have here.. a view of the upper cage, showing my "novel" PVC hex coupling diagonal holder, curved hacksaw blade spiders, and that nice black plastic folder shroud.

And also, a closer view: my helical focuser (from a 135mm "Carenar" telephoto lens that was Sacrificed For Science), homemade 70-degree 24mm widefield eyepiece from Surplus Shed components, and 50mm finder from Surplus Shed $5 cemented 52mm achromat doublet. Also note the 8.50 peso hose clamps securing it to the upper cage. Can one spell cheap?