Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

 

How’s one of my favorite telescopes of all time, Charity Hope Valentine, my ETX125 PE Maksutov Cassegrain, doing? Muchachos, the reason you haven’t heard much about her in long while is because the answer to that has been, “Not good, not good at all.” For all practical purposes my long-time companion was dead. I’d tried to take good care of her…but…

Charity,  you see, is no spring chicken; she is going on 21 years old. She’s had a good life for a small (5-inch) telescope, I think.  I know your old Uncle and his slightly neurotic ETX girlfriend have enjoyed countless astronomical adventures.  This one and this one being but two examples of many. Alas, time takes its toll on us all…

I tried to take good care of Missy, but things began to fail. First came her Autostar’s keyboard. I put that right, however, and she was fine for years. Her true decline began with the hand control’s coiled cable giving up the ghost followed swiftly by other minor parts and pieces—the power cord, tripod components, RA lock, etc., etc. It was no problem to replace these things, though (like the self-tapping screws that fell out of the Autostar of their own accord), and Charity said she intended to outlive Unk.

Alas, two years ago, the inevitable critical failure occurred: The Autostar hand control, without which the ETX can’t even track in RA, let out the magic smoke. This was heralded by the display turning to hieroglyphics and going blank as we observed NGC 5053 on an early summer evening. My heart sank. Normally, I’d have grumbled and bought a new Autostar HC, but with the fall of Meade that was no longer an option.

By the light of day, your Old Uncle got the Autostar open and surveyed the damage. I’d hoped it was “only” the display (which is becoming difficult to obtain for older ETXes), but I noticed several burned ICs, too. I trimmed the ribbon cable and cleaned the connector on the board and powered Charity up, but the display remained stubbornly blank. More looking revealed more damaged components. What would I do? What would I do? I’d have to give the situation some thought…and months and months rolled by…

Not that I didn’t think about Charity. I thought about her frequently. In my opinion, the PCB was a basket case, and the display was possibly bad as well. Trying to repair the hand control just didn’t seem like much of an option. So… I kept my eye out for a used Meade Autostar 497 at a reasonable price. I didn’t see one, though. Used Autostars are now going for as much as $400 with no guarantee they aren’t on the edge of failure—assuming they work at all. I considered ponying up the $200 - $400 they cost on the eBay anyway if that was what it took to revive my little girlfriend, but it just didn’t seem wise. Maybe there was a better way.

Deforking Charity was easy--at first!

What was that better way? Deforking the girl. Removing her optical tube from her fork mount, installing a dovetail bracket on her underside (sorry, hon), and using Charity on my Celestron Advanced VX mount—or maybe even purchasing a small GEM  for her. I’d considered that idea before but rejected it. I wanted Charity back just the way she’d always been.

Howsomeever, in addition to me beginning to lose hope about finding a good deal on an Autostar, I began thinking about what the reality of Miss C had always been. I’d originally been attracted to Charity because living here in Possum Swamp there are plenty of iffy nights. It would be nice to have a scope with decent aperture and more portability than a C8 for those “maybe” evenings. The ETX provided that to some extent, but I quickly found the MCT was heavier than I expected (don’t look at me like that, Charity!). Her fork and OTA were frankly not much more portable than a C8. Having the ETX’s tube separate from the mount would make her more manageable for your decrepit correspondent.

Also, the girl had her quirks. Some nights her goto pointing was flat out amazing. Other nights, even nights at the same site with the same alignment stars, she struggled to find anything, especially objects high in the sky. Her tracking? It was OK in alt-azimuth mode, but repositioning an object in the field was a pain due to backlash. Equatorial mode? Let’s just say you could forget doing any imaging other than lunar and planetary. There was plenty of periodic error in addition to the backlash that plagued the telescope no matter how often you did the “drive training” routine.

On the other hand, Charity’s optics are first rate. Also, 5-inches doesn’t fall that far behind 8-inches, not at a dark site, anyway. The times I’ve pitted my girl against Meade and Celestron 8-inch SCTs, she’s kept up with them. And, yes, I still loved Charity Hope Valentine, and in these latter days I believed I’d use her more than ever if I could just bring her back in slightly more portable fashion. If deforking her would allow the girl to live on, that’s just what I would do.

So, one afternoon this past June, I finally undertook to do the deed. With Charity on the operating table in my radio shack/workshop of the telescopes, the Batcave, I got to work. Removing the tube from the fork should have been simple, and on most ETXes it would have been. You just remove four hex bolts, two on either side of the rear cell, that hold the fork adapter plates to the cell. I did that and out they came, no fuss, no muss. Until there was muss. I tried to slide Charity forward or back to remove her from the fork, but she wouldn’t budge.

Done!

The main problem was a part unique to the PE series ETXes, a plastic collar that wraps around the top half of the rear cell. This (I found out after I got it off) is used to protect the cable bundle leading from the drivebase to the telescope’s LNT Smartfinder. That red-dot finder is mounted to the collar, not the rear cell—I’d always assumed the collar was part of the cell. Anyhow, after some experimentation it was clear that without removing this collar Charity wasn’t going anywhere.

The collar was attached to the rear cell with a single bolt.  The bolt was small, but looking closely, even my tired old peepers could see it was some kind of star head. Hokay. I had a bunch of star wrenches, including some small ones. Unfortunately, even the smallest was too large. There was, however, a gap between the bracket holding the collar in place and the rear cell. I was able to press it in enough to allow me to grip the bolt with a pair of forceps and remove it. Whew!

The rest was relatively easy. On most ETXes, you can pull the fork arms apart enough to make it easy to slide the OTA out. However, for the PE, Meade beefed-up the fork (like more recent 125s it is plastic outside, but aluminum inside), and I found it difficult to flex the arms at all. I finally discovered that moving the tube adapter plates that had been screwed into the rear cell down and out of the way provided enough clearance to allow me to free the OTA.  I have hung onto Charity’s fork mount in case it becomes possible/desirable to revive it.

The rest was easy. I got the girl up to the main house and bolted a William Optics Vixen-compatible dovetail bracket into the bracket on the underside of Charity’s tube (she wishes I would stop talking about her underside). Kudos to Meade for providing a ¼-20 “foot” on the ETX. It came to me that the Vixen dovetail would also allow me to use C on my SkyWatcher AZ-4 altazimuth mount on those (not infrequent) nights when I am really lazy.

How was balance when I mounted Charity on the AVX GEM? RA was no problem, though I did have to slide the single Synta pancake weight nearly all the way up to balance. Declination? Charity is quite front end heavy due to her deep and thick Maksutov corrector, and the tube had to be pretty far back in the dovetail, but, again, no problem.

Looking good on the AVX...

Finishing up, I gave the girl a good cleaning/polishing and installed a base for a Rigel Quick Finder on her rear cell. How’d she look? I thought her silkscreened/anodized tube (with a metallic-pink North America Nebula) looked as good as ever. Maybe even better out in the open on a GEM rather than nestled in a fork. As for the Quick Finder, I think that will be perfect. I had been worried about getting her old Smartfinder off and was glad it turned out to be attached to that removable collar instead of the cell.

The only thing I was concerned about? That Charity’s fixed diagonal would cause the equatorial mount to place the eyepiece in some inconvenient positions. Tube rings might be preferable, but they are difficult to find in the correct size, and I’m not a fan of loosening rings to change the eyepiece angle anyway. At best, that’s caused me to mess up my goto alignment and at worst to nearly drop a Newtonian OTA onto the ground. I do have an LAR adapter that might allow me to use a standard diagonal in C. We’ll see if that’s worth fooling with.

All that remained was seeing how the girl performed on the AVX under a starry sky…

I should have waited longer to give the “new” Charity Hope Valentine her First Light. The July evening I set her up in Chaos Manor South’s backyard was miserable, just miserable. When the sun finally began his exit from the hazy, partly cloudy sky, the temperature was still over 80F, the humidity was high, and the skeeters didn’t wait till full dark before biting your poor Uncle. But I was a man with a mission. Would the girl be useable on a GEM? I got to work getting AVX and ETX ready.

Not only had I not used Charity in a long time, I hadn’t used the Celestron mount in a while, either. I wasn’t too concerned, though. I’ve aligned the AVX a million times over the 13 years I’ve had it and know the procedure like the back o’ me hand. I got the tripod up, then decided it needed to be shorter. As above, that fixed ETX diagonal can put the eyepiece in inconvenient positions—mainly “too high” with the scope pointing at targets at lower altitudes.

Tripod? Check. Mount head? Check. Power cord and hand controller plugged in? Check. Counterweight? Check. Charity on mount and balanced? Check. With the telescope pointing toward the North Celestial Pole, however, I could see the eyepiece was still too high to reach. I collapsed the tripod legs some more and went inside to wait for dark.

When astronomical twilight arrived (not till nine freaking thirty), out to the backyard I went. Power up! The Celestron hand control displayed the correct time despite me not having replaced the RTC battery in… well, who knows? Anyhoo, I only fumbled a little with the alignment. I had to skip one calibration star the mount offered because it was too low, and at first wasn’t sure which button to mash to select another. Finally, my last star was in the field of the 25mm crosshair eyepiece at 75x when Missy stopped her slew. What now? Why M13, of course.

She looks right at home on the AZ-4.

If you want to know how the Great Globular looked in my reborn girlfriend, take a gander at last month’s AstroBlog, but I will say it didn’t look like much. Maybe more than I expected, but not much more. Next up? M92, that other Hercules glob. May I commit heresy? I thought M92 looked better than M13 on this lousy night.

By the time I’d spent a while with M92, the sky was, if anything, worse. The clouds weren’t the problem; it was the haze. Chaos Manor South’s sky was milk with only the brightest stars peeping through the mess. I thought I’d try a couple more deep sky objects, beginning with M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, but it was barely visible (it was low in altitude for one thing). I packed it in but didn’t pack it up. I tossed a scope cover over my girl and headed for the den. It’s aways nice to be able to leave a telescope set up in my secure backyard when rain does not appear imminent.

The next morning? The sky was clear, but blocking the Sun showed the sky was still crazy-hazy. I brought C and the AVX back inside.  I was satisfied, however, and had nothing to complain about regarding how Charity had behaved on the Celestron mount. There will be no more  of those evenings when she has some sort of meltdown and refuses to find DSOs. The only gotcha? I need to remember to keep the tripod as low as possible. No matter! Charity was back!

What would come next for my slightly neurotic gal pal? I wanted to try her on the SkyWatcher altazimuth mount when the Moon was back in the sky.  The Moon came back, alright, but with it came Tropical Storm Bertha, which despite Uncle Rod’s pleas, “Bertha doncha come around here anymore!”  brushed our coast. The main effect? More clouds, layers of them.

Nevertheless, I was able to get out and view a few stars and get a glimpse of Luna with Charity on the  AZ-4 mount. Verdict? A manual alt-azimuth mount is not perfect for such a long focal length telescope, but it was OK. At 315x via an Orion (Synta) 6mm Expanse eyepiece, the shakes were there but were bearable. The only somewhat objectionable thing? Due to the ETX’s fixed diagonal, the eyepiece was always to the side.

That’s not a big deal, but it is a deal. If it begins to annoy me, I can use a standard SCT diagonal via the L.A.R. adapter I mentioned above. And, yes, this mount does make C. into quite the portable telescope. However, only a full observing run with her in this configuration will allow me to decide if it’s a useable way for me to observe with The ETX.

Space Summer Comes Again

Ready to go QRV from Battleship Park!

Yes, your increasingly ancient Uncle just completed yet another trip around ol’ Sol last month, his 73^rd. I celebrated it as I have for a long while, with space, ham radio, and Mexican food. How did space travel and the space program come to be associated with my summertime birthday?

Back when I was a little squeaker, I liked to play space and spacemen during those glorious summer vacations of yore, even more than I liked playing army or monsters (“Werewolf’s Out Tonight!”) as the Sun sank on long July afternoons. Once Unk was finally grown up, there were summer vacation trips with Miss Dorothy to the Space and Rocket center in Huntsville, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This year? Unk’s birthday was decidedly more modest…

Of course there was ham radio. With the coming of Parks on the Air (amateurs go to a national or state park and “activate” it, contact as many fellow operators from there as possible) amateur radio has become more of a summer activity for Unk than ever. The way you play POTA as an activator is you set your portable station up in a park and work a minimum of ten “hunters”—hams hunting parks from home.

As Unk’s birthday week approached. I’d kept a weather eye on the sky, but it looked like I might get lucky this year. The days preceding my birthday on Friday the 17^th were stormy, but when Friday neared, it was obvious the weather gods would cooperate. I loaded the ham radio gear into Miss Van Pelt, my 4Runner, and headed to Battleship Alabama Park, Parks on the Air Park US-11376. 

The Great Gray Lady.

I got the little (Chinese) Xiegu G90 transceiver (20 watts) and my Chameleon portable (vertical) antenna up and got on the air. It was tough sledding, campers. The 20-meter ham band was not in great shape; it was up and down all day. Nevertheless, I got the required number of contacts and worked a couple more for good measure. As noon came in, however, and the temperature hit the mid-90s (let’s not even talk about “real feel”), your ancient Uncle knew it was time to head home.  

Of course, that evening Miss Dorothy and I repaired to my fave Mexican restaurant, El Giro’s (“The Special Chicken”) just down the road a mile or three from Chaos Manor South. There? That’s no mystery. I ordered, as always, the wonderful Number 13:  Chile rellenos, burrito, enchilada. Man was it good! And the margaritas? They were, if anything, extra good.

Back home at Chaos Manor South, I was too tired to take even a small telescope into the backyard, but I fulfilled the space part of Space Summer 2026 with the viewing a bunch of Project Gemini videos on DVDs I got from the old Spacecraft Films. After I’d watched the films to the accompaniment of a little of the Rebel Yell—and catnip for the felines—I began to doze off. I figured I was entitled to. It had been a big day and a fun day.

Next:  A Tasco Comes to Chaos Manor South…