I’m working on a project for a beginner’s astrophotography book and to avoid cheating, bought a bunch of budget equipment to try out with a DSLR, tripod and Fornax Lightrack. Focusing on a DSLR can be a bit of a chore without PC support, so I found a bright star to the south and tried to focus on it using the liveview on the LCD.
Dammit! This refractor is awful, I thought to myself. It must have a de-centered element or something, as the best I could manage was an elongated orange blob.
4 days later, I realized I had been looking at Saturn.
“I’m too smart for that” he says, as he replaces the broken gearbox on his G11 because he forgot to tighten the clutches before going to lunch at the Texas Star Party with midday dust devils forming everywhere :>).
Good luck with your new book, I’ll bet it will be a winner.
I started with an Canon OM1 and black and white film in the mid 1980’s, you did not know for sure how well the camera was focused until you got to look at the film strip negatives.I still have the test negatives for focus and exposure setting failures.The high tech item was the Ronchi screen devices to give a real time view for best focus.The hard part was manual guiding with a reticle eyepiece where thirty minutes into exposure your foot bumps the mount. Believe me the ease of imaging today is light years ahead of those days.
ROTFL! I remember a long time ago, when we did polar alignments with a polar scope when portable. Myself and a friend were at a new site and there were a few passing clouds. We both got nicely set up on Polaris.
Only to discover we had both picked the same “not Polaris” to align on…
Couple of years ago on the annual trip down to SW TX, spent almost 90 minutes the first night troubleshooting focus problems. NOTHING was coming to focus where it should. I mean…things weren’t 10-20…or even 100…steps off. They were over a thousand off.
WTH?
Finally, after I picked up moved that stupid metal ring on the table that kept getting in my way for what seemed like the millionth time, I remembered it was the spacer in front of the CCD…and I’d set it there so i didn’t forget to install it when setting everything up.
