Thanks for the post. I have been looking for a way to add a rotator without disturbing the optical train. I have just completed my version of your idea and it works wonderfully. Can't wait until night fall. Once again a big thanks for posting your idea. 😊😊
Fantastic work. Exactly the solution I was looking for. Excellent video all around. Definitely better than the tape strip I was using on the OTA. Should last much longer.
Great idea. A suggestion for additional accuracy would be to add a $20-30 digital protractor to your rig. It can easily be mounted on a focus motor with a couple pieces of double sided tape or velcro tape.
Thanks! For a 4" refractor, I'd measure the OD of the OTA and go to the hardware store and shop around. Keep in mind, you're going to split the ring to open it up a bit and that's going to give you some more to slip over the OTA.
Thanks for sharing. I got the chance to see a rocket launch in 2018. Memorable experience. I uploaded a pretty fun montage of the journey to my channel.
Ain't it enough to just rotate the whole shebang at the draw tube? Any particle on the actual objective lens, unless freaking huge, is way too far away from the image plane to be visible in the sub, even at extreme levels of stretching way past reasonable - whatever minuscule shadow it casts is simply bigger than your image plane at that distance from it. What we need to worry about, are dust bunnies on the sensor(d'uh), sensor cover glass, filters, and the corrector/flattener, with the further we go from the sensor, the lesser severity of artifacts. As long as you rotate all that at once, your flats won't change.
Why I didn't think of rotating the telescope... facepalm! I even bought a $35 rotator for my 72 Skywatcher that didn't fit... another facepalm. Plus what's worse is... this is exactly what I did with my large Newtonian (as Dakota mentions, minus some elegance, but the same principle).
