Astronomy Bug

On April 8, 2024, I loaded up the truck with a few things and a few friends, and headed south to Ohio to view the total solar eclipse. Having learned my lesson in 2017, I stayed away from both expressways and larger cities. We went to a town of a few thousand and viewed the event from a small city park. The trip down and back were entirely unencumbered by traffic since we went on small two lane country roads. By contrast, in 2017 we went on expressways and spent hours sitting stopped on the road. We did set up some camera equipment, but an important rule of solar eclipses is to NOT spend all your time messing with cameras. Your first priority should be to EXPERIENCE the eclipse. Photography comes second   Other than eclipse glasses, I set up a 360 camera to run the whole time, plus an SLR with a 600mm lens and solar filter.  I put an intervalometer on it and set it to take a photo every 30 seconds, and started it a few minutes before first contact. I loaded an app that uses my...

I'm afraid I've overdone it a bit in the last few weeks. First, I found a first-gen 8 inch LX200 on Marketplace for a decent price (about what the optical tube is worth, which is what the experts suggest for this generation). The mount seems to work well. It came with some other stuff, mostly not that useful but there were two decent eyepieces in the bunch, a Meade 4000 series 26mm plossl, and a TeleVue 32mm Plossl. I took it to the lab and did some playing with it. It appears to be functioning well. The sellers had attached it to a 12V power supply. It should have 18V. I'm working on getting 18V sources for it for both AC and battery. I did replace the capacitors in the hand controller, that's mandatory on these early models.    LX200 in a very messy lab The first thing I ordered for it is a 2" dielectric mirror diagonal. I put one on a C8 that I owned years ago and it was a FANTASTIC upgrade. Super solid, very bright, makes using 2" eyepieces possible and pl...