Velcro & Flat Tyres

[Rocket Pooch]

Hi,

Just thought I'd share this technical experience.

Last night I was doing a quick session with ye old telescope between the clouds.  I decided not to collimate the LX90 but just got stuck into some visual stuff.  M57 check, M27 excellent, m13 wow.

So In I trot to get the SAC8, set it up, took some images through the refractor, Moon wee, then M13 with a 2x Barlow.

So, I thought, what the hell its only 11pm, I put the focal reducer on, whacked the telescope on vega and focused.  

Strange, the rings looked like they have a flat tyre.  Take out SAC8, look down the hole, looks fine.  Focus in out, shake it all about and nope, still looks like a flat tyre, at this point I thought sod it, I just got the focus as good as I could and took a set of M57 wide field images (not as good as Paul's but he).

So then the clouds came in and I packed up.

It was at this point I noticed the glue holding the Velcro on the dew shield had come loose and the thing had changed shape.

Cunningly the dew shield had changed it shape to a flat tyre.  Hmm.

I can only congratulate BC&F on the quality of the glue they use on their flexible dew shield.

Going out to by some glue today and a new bungee for the dew shield.

[Rick]

One of the small stands at the BAA exhibition meeting last Saturday was a collection of bits helpfully labelled "Blue Peer Astronomy". It included several cardboard and Baader foil solar filters and a dew shield made out of a karri-mat.

[Mike]

I added extra strips of Velcro on the ETX dew shield as the original ones were crap. I used standard stickybacked black Velcro. Stays on fine now and holds it's shape. It is a lot smaller then the LX90 one though.

[JohnP]

So where's the images then Chris? John

[Rocket Pooch]

Giza chance

[Whitters]

Yeah Chris where's the images, Gimmie image gimmie image.