The trip to Harvard, MA was a bust

One thing you can be sure of is the more things you need for a sky gazing trip out the more chances things can go wrong. More than once I have trekked 45 miles out to Harvard, MA only to have forgotten a key item or have something fail. Once last year it was the AVX mount. Once, with my previous scope, a Meade 127ED, it was ... arrgghh... the 2" to 1.25" adapter. 

The most recent night, 2/6/2016, it was the DC to AC converter I use to power the laptop off of the car battery. It suddenly stopped working. Lacking a spare fuse or a way to test the fuse continuity I cut my night short trying to image on my aging Acer battery. It barely delivered 90 minutes. The one image acquired was not worth keeping.

Now here's the kicker. When I got home a test of the fuse showed it was fine. I plugged the DC/AC converter into the jump starter 12v port and it worked. Huh? I the tried it in the car and after a couple of plugs and unplugs, well it worked. Well at least the 90 mile drive was on $1.49 gas instead of $3.49 gas from a few years ago.

Okay, I blinked first on the Celestron Travel Scope 70

I ordered a Celestron Travel Scope 70 (TS70) from B&H Photo As a bonus they include a free red LED flash light that they value at $12.95*. I also ordered a Celestron Universal Piggyback Mount  from the same vendor.

Mounting the TS70 on the Celestron 8/SCT is simple with the supplied screws and matching pre-drilled holes. The AVX counterweight is not sufficient to counterbalance the SCT, the TS70 and the 9x50RACI finder. Thus in the field I will align the system first with help of the finder.,park the system pointing at Polaris then install the TS70 and remove the 9x50 RACI finder.

I've only had one clear night since procuring the TS70; the day I received it. It was windy and seeing was lousy. Thus, I set up the C8/SCT on the patio with the TS70 riding piggy back. From my south facing patio I cannot see Polaris, so rough aligned with North and used Rigel and Procyon as alignment stars. Below is an image of M42 (Orion Nebula) averaged from 25 8sec exposures.

 

The image is reduced 50% from the original size. The brightest stars are quite bloated which I hope means the can be improved in sharpness with better focusing and IR filtering. This will prove interesting considering the crudeness of this scope's rack and pinion focuser.

Since this first night trial I checked the and improved  TS70's collimation with a Cheshire eyepiece using the shaking method suggested by a  10 Minute Astronomy blog post. Tonight  I'll head out to Harvard MA  to put it through its paces.  This post was originally composed on 3/6/16.

*It turns out, despite containing a 9V battery, the battery appears to be non-standard. Thus, the battery could not be replaced rendering the red flash light useless.