The Von Braun Astronomical Society (VBAS) is a non-profit organization of amateur and professional astronomers. We are sharing our love of space with the community through our planetarium and observatories located in Monte Sano State Park just east of Huntsville, Alabama.
Is that a shell chip on the corrector plate next to the secondary mirror? I know it won't really hurt the image, but still i imagine there's no spare parts for these vintage SCTs
i've been looking into all sky camera builds as i'm interested in live streaming daytime cloud video footage. im not necessarily interested in creating time lapses as much but i was wondering if following an all sky camera build would be suitable for something like this? i'm also a bit confused on if all sky is actually more the software over the build and what that allows me to do?
This is a great project, but the cameras pricing kill the community adoption pretty quickly. You should show the raspberry pi HQ cameras, much cheaper and are easier to source.
I understand the why for using the zwo cameras. They are built for this. But they cost anything from 150 euros to 600 euros. A pi hq camera costs 50 euros, anyone can get one, and get results. This is a lot more interesting for the army of people with a pi and a pi camera at home, because they don’t need to buy anything else, and they can try the software and see if they like it. That increases the ease of adoption tremendously.
@@VonBraunAstroSociety I tried to use the Pi cameras and had no luck. They were not recognized by the Raspberry for whatever reason. I ended up with the ASI178MC that works fine. I also found the camera on sale so that was a win...
Capturing meteors is one of the big ones. There is a whole network of people across the UK with them who feed data into a group looking to pinpoint meteorite landings. A couple of years ago there was a bright meteor (fireball) observed in the S of England. Within a couple of hours a landing area of a square Km was worked out and the next day significant portions of a very rare type of meteorite were recovered. Thats one use.
A nice scope but I must confess as most of my stargazing is done on hikes I'm a scope minimalist!I am going for a rural walk tomorrow and as the Moon is pretty much full I'll only be taking a Zeiss Mini Quick 5x10 monocular as the moonlight means I won't be looking for deep sky objects.
Very, very nice, I visited a retired 18" newt’ a few days ago, it weighed tens of tonnes! Unfortunately my originally red haired complexion almost never needs sun-screen, much _worser_ at night looking up at greyness for weeks😡
I would be more concerned with the Schmidt corrector plate. It appears to have some damage and it cannot be replaced if it were to break. The mirrors on the other hand can be recoated to a new condition. @@givenfirstnamefamilyfirstn3935
You guys are doing a nice job on this. I have a SW package that provides telescope control with commercial servo drives via CANopen and I also make a servo drive that is cheaper than the one you have there.
What is the torque rating on your motor? Did it come with the rotor nested inside the stator? I get my motors with the stator separate and I have a jig that lowers the rotor into the stator as the pull-in force is quite large.
you want to get the ring concentricity down to about 0.001", but as long as the light is blue or green it will give you a good signal and you can model out encoder eccentricity if you have sine and cosine terms in your modeling SW.
Good morning Sir. Your project is very interesting to me as I am currently working on the design of my first home made EQ mount. I want my mount to be direct drive using BLDC torque motor such as the one you adapt on your mount. Could you please share with me(us) some details about this motor and the drive to control it? Thanks a lot!!
