Testing #2 on 29 Dec 2022

After more than a month of cloudy nights and non stop raining, the sky tonight is finally clear enough for me to haul out the scope in front of the house to do some more testing! 

The pier goes out first, followed by the counterweights. 

The trolley with the powerbank, eyepieces, AutoStar and accessories next.

Finally the optical tube assembly or OTA. 

Next, I aligned the axis of the mount to face exactly North, using my iPhone compass app (ensuring that it is set to true north, not magnetic north). Twenty plus years ago, before the advent of smartphones, I had to do it with a good old compass and back then I didn't know about the need to adjust and compensate for true north! 

After ensuring the pier is completely level with the iPhone level app and using a mini jack to make minor adjustments, I locked the wheels of the pier and put in the counterweights. 

OTA goes on next, balance check, lock to "home position" and basic setup is ready. All done in just under 20 minutes. Not too bad if I say so myself ! 

Plugged in the powerbank and AutoStar controller, connect the controller to my laptop, power on the drive and we're in business.  

My Meade 826C 8inch f/6 Newtonian Setup

Using mini jacks to ensure the pier is level

Once powered up, I did the 2 star alignment and pointed it to the gibbous Moon which was almost directly overhead. It's off by about 4 degrees. That's because I did not bother to center the stars for the alignment. Why ? Because after so many years, I've forgotten how to do it ! Need to read up the manuals again to re-learn it. 

I centered the moon on the finder scope and peered thru the 40mm eyepiece at the main focuser to center it using the the #497, then go back to make minor adjustments to center the finder scope. 

Tested the recently acquired 6mm, 15mm, with and without the 2x Barlow, works as expected ! Saw the moon, Jupiter and its moons, The Pleiades. Tried Saturn but it was too close to the horizon and there were some cloud covers.   

Next, I inserted the 2x Barlow and then plug in my Canon 750D DSLR and took this : 

Moon - taken with a Canon 750D with 2x Barlow

Not too bad for a first ever attempt using a digital SLR camera ! The is without any adjustments all. With further fine tuning, I believe it can be a lot better. 

The last time I tried to take a photo on the Moon was with a Canon film camera! 

More to come ! 

Wheels II - The Sequel

I have added a set of wheel for the telescope pier abou 2 weeks back. Now I realised that they need to be secured to ensure that the polar alignment stays in place when I do the setup. So there has to be a locking mechanism. So I went online and looked for an M12 screw type castor and luckily I found them. 

This is the new set of wheels. The main difference is that it has a metallic flap that you can push down to lock the wheels and prevent it from moving. 

Star test after 17 years

9:00pm Saturday 17 Dec 2022 - some parts of the sky was clear and Jupiter and Mars was visible. The Moon only rises at about 3:00am. December has been a difficult month, it's the monsoon season and it's been raining with overcast everyday for the past month. 

Finally there is some break in the clouds and it's time to star test the telescope after being dormant for close to 17 years! 

Moved all the equipment out to the front on the house and hope to take aim at some brighter object to do so testing. Managed to set this all up in about 25 minutes, without 2 or 3 star alignment since the Meade Autostar handbox LCD screen is not working and not displaying anything at all. 

Managed to get a glimpse of Jupiter with a 30mm Plossl at 40x. Looks great, the image was crisp and clear, testament to Meade's great optics that still works after 37 years. 

First night testing the old Meade 826C 

Next was Mars, and used 15mm Celestron Luminous eyepiece at 80x, looks great. But the clouds rolled in again and visibility was reduced. 

I've been using the handbox to slew the telescope at different speeds. Glad to confirm that all other functions of the #497 still works very well. Can't wait to get the LCD screen fixed! 

Yes, I can still use my laptop computer to point and click to slew the scope but I didn't want to haul everything out at this time.

As for the new FlashFish 48,000mAh power bank, it's well worth the investment. After about 1 hour of slewing around, the status still at full bar. Not too bad. 

FlashFish power bank with 12V DC output

By then it was about 10:00pm and with no much else visible, I've decided to call it a night. 

Not too bad. Taking it one step at a time. 

More testing to come! Especially for the Meade Autostar 497 handbox and tracking system.

I hope to take photos with my DSLR camera attached in future outings. 

Wheels

The original pier that came with the Meade 826 did not have any wheels, making it difficult to move around. Which is one of the key reason why I didn't haul it out to the nearby field to do observations as often as I would or should. 

So this time around, my focus is to find ways to make it easier to transport and setup the telescope. Having a good set of wheels for the piece will go a long way. 

I stumbled across the furniture moving castors / wheels at Ace Hardware while shopping last week. The concave area inside the 3 wheels looks ideal for the round leg of the pier. So I decided to get a few of them. Much to my delight, it fits perfectly ! The original screw jack can also go thru the center hole and can be locked into position.

Here's how it looks now :

I am back, after close to 12 years since my last blog post

 My last posting was on 25 Jan 2010. 

That was close to 12 years ago. Time flies. I was busy pursuing my career, at that time I just took on a new job role in a large conglomerate as the head of IT department. 

Fast forward 12 years, I have finally found the time to restart for my very first hobby which got me started on this journey like 41 years ago. 

But first thing first - my 8 inch Newtonian telescope has been in cold storage and it's time to take it out and do a thorough check on it and see whether it can still be used. 

I will update the status of the assessment and my plan to restore this beautiful piece of equipment which will take me on another journey across the universe !

Stay tuned !  

P.S. The scope buggy was never built. 

Scope Buggy

The biggest pain about having a large telescope is hauling it outdoors to do your viewing.

So now I am considering building my very own scope buggy i.e. a platform with wheels to that I can easily push it out to the lawn and start viewing almost immediately.

My usual set up time can take up to 30 minutes and I do hope to reduce that by half.

Busy busy busy

I have not made any postings for almost 2 months now. My work has really taken up a lot of my time, reaching home between 7:00pm to 8:00pm daily, feeling tired on top of that. So no late night observations for me despite a couple of invitations sent out by Tommy.

Anyway the secondary mirror on my Newtonian is out of alignment. I have done some alignment manually but have not the opportunity to do the star test. Guess it will be some time before I can start observing again.

Star Atlas II

I was at Border's in Berjaya Times Sqaure last year. While browsing the astronomy section, I came across the ultimate star atlas. I have seen it on the Astronomy managzine a thousand times, secretly wishing I can own one of it. It was describes as the only atlas that you will ever need - the Sky Atlas 2000.0 Deluxe Edition! This atlas contains 26 super size charts (double A3 size) covering the whole sky and showing 81,312 single, multiple, and variable stars of magnitude 8.5 and brighter and 2,700 deep-sky objects





It was going for RM210 and there are only 2 copies left. After thinking about it for 2 seconds, I decided to buy it, with my credit card and figure a way to pay for it later. This is too rare an opportunity to miss.

It's definately much much better than my 20 year old, black and white atlas. Here's snapshot of Orion - it's double the size!

Star Atlas

Hey there, sorry for the very long silence. I have been very busy at work, trying to deliver and close a project with near impossible deadlines. Anyway, the main phase of project is almost done and now I have some room to get back to where I left off.

So back to the topic - Maps has always fascinated me. It’s a bird’s eye view of things and it gives me a sense of where I am and where I am heading. I had the map of the world on my room wall ever since I was 12 years old. My brother and I used to memorize names of cities and weird islands - like Disco Island off the coast of Greenland. (Bet you didn’t know that!) Naturally, we didn't have any problems with our geography. Besides scrutinizing at them, I'd love drawing maps and my drawings used to be the showcase for the entire class.

By the time I was 16, I was deep into astronomy already. So naturally, a star atlas was one of the first thing I went looking for. I checked out the school library, the national library as well as the local bookstore but could not find any – you have to remember that it was the mid 1980’s! The pre-Internet era.

Then one day I “discovered” a star atlas at the British Council library. The pages and colors were beautiful. But the atlas was classified as reference material and cannot be removed from the library and I desparately need one to navigate the skies. Then I noticed that there is a photocopier that can handle A3 size paper for only 20 cents a copy, there were 14 pages so that worked out to be RM2.80. Although it was black and white but it was worth having it! So I made a copy of it and had it bound.

Twenty three years later, I still have it. Check it out.

The cover of my very first star atlas.

The first 2 pages. List of objects on the left and the map (folded) on the right.

The right page unfolded. It didn't have lines to mark the constellations, so it's a bit diffifult to read and navigate.

No color? No problem, just add your own! A close up of Orion.

And of course, my journey did not end there. It was just the beginning. More coming ...

Meade Starfinder 826 with LXD-75

Thanks for the emails and since some of you guys requested a close up of the modified pier and here it is ....

This is the side view of the mount.

The bottom, inside view of the mount.

Bottom view with the Vixen pier removed.

The tube of the pier - the smaller holes closer to the top was for the old mount. There are 3 new holes drilled for the new mount.

Deadline

I have not the time to make any new post for the past 2 weeks. Work has really caught up with me and since the project deadline is looming, the whole team has been working late. We have gone up to 4 days with very little sleep and needless to say, I have absolutely no time to haul out my telescope to do some serious observing.

I look forward to the Lunar eclipse this March 4 but I seriously doubt that I have the time. The same goes for the Astronomy Convention 2007 on 9 March in USM, Penang. That will be a 4.5 hours drive from Kuala Lumpur, tough luck. So if anyone of you out there who will be attending, tell me all about it OK?

In the meantime, if you are looking for a good astro community to join, check out Cloudy Nights.com, a wonderful community about telescopes and telescope making, lot of great information and helpful people there.

My first telescope - Part III

The original clock drive on the Starfinder 826 was beyond salvation. So after some research, I decided to replace the mount with a newer, better one with "Go To" capability. Naturally, I looked up the Meade catalogue, trying to find the best solution. The LXD-55 mount works out to be OK, in theory at least, but the LXD-55 has been around since 2001 and persistent rumours of a newer mount coming out soon held me back for a while.

Finally the word was out - the LXD-55 will be replaced by the LXD-75. The best part is LXD-75 is miles better and comes complete with Autostar #497. With it you can point the telescope to any of the 30,223 celestial objects in the database automatically. So no more moving the telescope by hand and having to track the objects manually.

Meade AutoStar #497 Controller

Again I went back and consulted Looi at Infinity Infocus, the Malaysian dealer for Meade to see if the 826 mount can be upgraded with an LXD-75 drive. I did not want to use a tripod because it will obstruct the counter weights. That' s because since my location is very close to the equator and the latitute adjustment has to be set very close to zero degrees. At that angle, the counter weight will hit the tripod at certain angles. The idea is to stick to the good sturdy old pier of the 826.

The new mount - note the distance between the counter weights and the black color pier. If it was a tripod, the counter weight bar will most certainly hit one of the tripod legs.

Sure enough, after much discussion and brainstorming, we've got a solution - remove the old mount, drill 3 separate holes on the tube of the pier to extend it with Vixen pier, the put the LXD-75 mount on top of it. The end result was very satisfying, by June 2005 my 20 year old telescope is back in action with some serious "Go To" capability!

Meade LXD-75 mount with the Starfinder 826 pier - a unique combination.

Meade's Autostar is pretty cool. It is powered by a Motorola 68HC11, 8MHz procesor with 1MB flash memory. The 30,223 objects in the AutoStar database include :

• 5,386 objects from the Index Catalog (IC); galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters of all types; the complete Index Catalog
• 7,840 objects from the New General Catalog (NGC); additional galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters of all types; the complete New General Catalog
• 109 objects from the Caldwell Catalog of the best objects for small telescopes 110 Messier (M) objects; the complete Messier catalog
• 16,800 stars from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) catalog, including double stars, variable stars, and other stars of special note
• 50 Earth-orbiting satellites
• 26 asteroids, including all of the brightest asteroids
• 15 periodic comets
• 8 major planets from Mercury to Pluto

You can also program the AutoStar to include additional objects. Better yet, you can hook it up to your laptop and use the software to control the telescope. Just point on the desired object on the screen, say the Orion nebula M42, click and the telescope will slew and locate M42 for you.

Now all I need is an observatory to house all of that ....

My first telescope - Part II

Fast forward to 2005, the year I decided to pick up where I left off in 1987. The good old telescope was stored at my dad's house, at a nice little corner in a dark store room. I manage to drag the thing out, opened the optical tube and looked at the primary mirror. It's got some dust and fungus on it, the same goes for the secondary mirror. I dismantled the optical tube and mount and took it back to my house in Shah Alam. I spent a whole weekend cleaning it. The parts and screws had some rust on them and I must have used up half a can of WD40 cleaning them! The fibre glass tube is still in very good, sturdy condition despite sitting in the dark for close to 15 years! But outer coat of white lacquer had turned a bit yellowish.

The Meade Starfinder 826C, 8 inch f/6 with Rigel Finder.

Cleaning the primary mirror was the most crucial part. Having gone thru various web sites and consulted experts from all over the world in forums, I prepared the necessary – lots of distilled water, a bit of dish washing liquid, clean bucket and cotton, lots of it.

I removed the 8 inch primary mirror from the cell and immersed it in a bucket of distilled water, added 2 drops of dish liquid and used cotton to gently wipe or rather drag the cotton over the mirror surface three times while underwater. After that, rinse it with distilled water and leave it to dry. Worked like a charm – not a stain.

The secondary mirror was bad. After cleaning it the same way, the fungus was still there. So I sent it to Mr. Looi at Infinity Infocus to clean it using industrial grade ethanol. The result was much better but the damage was already done.

This the the view from the focuser, note the yellow stains on the secondary mirror.

After more than 15 years, the grease on the focuser was dirty and dry. I took the focuser apart to clean and put in a new layer of grease – Panef white lithium grease to be precise. It lasts longer and provider better lubrication that the regular yellow/brown color one. You can get it from Ace Hardware store. I also cleaned the finder scope and got rid of most of the fungal growth.

Next, fixing the clock drive ….

My first telescope - Part I

The year was 1985 and the once every 76 years' Comet Halley was fast approaching. I was very exicited about the event and I was absolutely delighted when my dad decided to buy a telescope so that we can see it up close. So I look thru the Astronomy magazine, examining my options and product sepcifications. There were many to choose from. There were names like Parks Optical, Celestron, Orion, Meade. And of course, there weren't any Malaysian made telescopes, so we have to order it and had it shipped from the US.

I was pretty sure that I wanted a reflector, it was a matter of which type and size - Newtonian or Catadioptric. After a week or so I decided to get a Meade Starfinder 826C, an 8 inch F/6 Newtonian reflector. Even back then Meade telescopes seemed like a pretty good product. The telescope comes with 9mm and 24mm eyepieces, worm gear clock drive, 8x25 finder and a German equitorial mount. It weighs in at 75 pounds. The price was only US$1,590, excluding shipping charges. Back then the exchange rate as only 2.56!

In comparison, the Meade 2080 LX5 with Quartz LX Pulse drive will set you back by US$3,600. The Celestron Super C8 Plus was going for US$2,400.

Today's Meade LX90 with goto capability only costs US$1,974. What a major leap in terms of price and capability! And I still have a copy of the good old Astronomy magazine with all the old prices and specifications and putting it next to a recent copy of the same magazine you can see a real difference in terms of technology, pricing, features and functions - amateur astronomy has indeed come a long way in 20 years.

I remember receiving the telescope some where early part of 1986. The shipping documents were lost when we shifted house some years back - and I cannot recall the exact date which we received it. 1986 was an evenful year - it was on 28 January that space shuttle challenger exploded some 72 seconds after take off. And yes, I saw Halley with and M42 as well.

The Meade 826C was not an easy telescope to use - for a 17 year old. And the clock drive as 110 volts and there was no way it could be used with our 240 volt current. To top it off, it was heavy, moving it in and out of the house was difficult. The telescope was mounted in a metal pier rather than tripod. I didn't have a car then so I had to contend with the skies in the front yard in Cheras.

My celestial adventures took a back seat in 1987 when I went to Australia to further my studies. And no, I did not bring the telescope along with me. Since I was the only astronmer in the family, the good old 826C was left untouched for many years. When I came back to Malaysia I was extremely busy with my career, got married along the way, further my studies again for 2 more years, before I had any budget or time to pursue my very first passion .... until recently.

How it all started

For me the was the defining moment happened more than 20 years ago. My father had just purchased his whole new set of the hard covered, golden colored, 24 volume, Encyclopedia Britannica, the best part of the deal was a bonus set of 12 volumes of maroon colored Children's Encyclopedia - that went to me and my younger brother.

My dad taught me how to use it as a reference for any topic you can think of (well, just about). Although he was not an engineer or scientist, my father has always been fascinated by science and technology. Every now and then he will tell us all about what he's read and about the wonders of science in our everyday lives.

Inspired by his vast knowledge in that area, I then decided to go thru the encyclopedia from cover to cover, going thru all the possible topics in a effort to "learn all things possible" - unfortunately that effort ended at the Astronomy chapter when I decided further explore by finding other references on this topic to quench my intense curiosity and fascination for the night sky. And I have been an amateur astronomer since.

So what's your story?

Email me at alpha.orinis@gmail.com and I will publish it here.

Welcome to Astronomy Malaysia!

Welcome to Astronomy Malaysia.

This is a blog site dedicated to all amateur astronomers in Malaysia. I plan to write and share about my experiences in this interesting subject. I invite readers and contributors alike, in the long run I hope to build a team of writers on this topic. I hope that this site will also a foundation for networking and knowledge sharing for all things astronomy.

And of course, it is not restricted to Malaysians only, I welcome astronomers from all over - terrestrial or otherwise!

I plan to have the following sections and categories :
1. Knowing the sky - guide to observational astronomy with periodic updates on new events
2. Viewing equipment - telescopes, mounts, binoculars, tips and tricks, product reviews
3. Astrophotography - camera, tracking, mounts and techniques
4. Observation sites - list and maps to dark sky sites around the country. I hope to collect and rate each of the site in terms of light pollution levels, accessbility, personal safety and proximity to good food and coffee!
5. Books and software - reference books, atlas, maps, reviews
6. Astro Buddy - social networking and informal gatherings @ observation sites or even StarBucks! May be publish a directory of Malaysian astronomers?
7. Buy and Sell -looking for pre-owned astronomy stuff? This is the place.

I hope that you will find this site useful, for beginners as we all advanced astronomers.

Feel free to send your comments and feedback to alpha.orinis@gmail.com

Do email me if you are keen to contribute articles.

Thank you.

P.S. - So why the nickname Orion? Because Orion is one of the largest and easily recognizable constellation in the night sky and its belt has always been used as a guide to locate other stars and constellations like Siruis and Aldeberan. So I hope that this blog will do the same for all of you.