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Current Rig, Mike Jaworski

Current Rig

Current Rig, Mike Jaworski

Current Rig

Description

I recently got through the upgrades I wanted to accomplish for my imaging rig. The OTA is still the good ol' Celestron Astromaster 114 that I modified, but there have been some additional changes to a lot of other things.



The mount is a Skywatcher EQ5 that's second hand.

I made dew/light shields for both the main OTA and the guide-scope. These are sheet-metal hoods that are painted white/black. In addition, the OTA light-shield has a velvet interior.

There is now (hanging from the mount) a dew heater system and cooler power supply. This unit runs off of AC and has manually adjustable outputs for dew heaters and a high-current 12V output for the thermoelectric cooler on the camera. I was having dew problems that would kill my autoguiding since that little PVC scope has the lens right in front.

The Canon 20D has been modified. I stripped the CFA from the sensor some time ago. It now has a cold-finger and a thermoelectric cooler attached to it for set-point cooling. It... kind of works. It definitely works at maintaining a constant temperature - it doesn't give a lot of temperature difference, though.

What is not really visible is an additional counter-weight attached directly to the OTA. This is a 4.25" reflector and the stock focuser is REALLY long so the camera adds a significant off-axis weight. This was really throwing my DEC balance off and I could see it in my autoguiding traces. I have added a 2.5 lb. counterweight that sticks out from the OTA located about opposite the focuser and camera. It is much better balanced, but I haven't run the autoguiding yet to confirm performance gains.

The first picture is the M20 Trifid Nebula image (monochrome). I think its an improvement.

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Description: Original upload got cropped by A-bin. This one should work better?

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Current Rig, Mike Jaworski

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