20 cm reflector

Updated July 29, 2012

My old mount system, Carton TA Alt-Az with counter weights and NGC SkyVector, worked very nicely. But it was as heavy as a German equatorial mount that often discourage me to use the system after I introduced 46 cm.


Upper right and left: Giro-WR with 5 kg weight.
Lower left: clinometer, lower right: the graduated ring that you can rotate.

Recently, free-stop mounts are getting popular and I purchased one of them; Giro-WR made in Germany. This mount weighs less than 1 kg and is easy to set up. I made a long shaft for a 5-kg ballast to take balance with 20 cm optical tube assembly.  This mount moves smoothly and you can track at a magnification up to 300x.

iPod app Skymap pro. Alt., Az, RA. and RD. are shown top left.

NGC SkyVector is not installed; instead a graduated azimuthal ring and a clinometer are placed. Combining the clinometer, the azimuth ring and a planetarium app in iPod, you can easily identify deep sky objects!

 

Old system
   20 cm, f: 800 mm, Vixen R-200SS reflector.

       12.5 cm ED was satisfactory as a comet-seeker but its light gathering power: as light pollution getting worse, I wanted to have larger aperture to compensate for it. A mounting for this telescope is the same with 12.5 cm ED. I worried about coma aberration, because this mirror has short focal ratio. Actually, with the combination of 30 mm 88 degrees German eyepiece, coma aberration was too strong to use it. However, it is not problem if you employ this eyepiece combining with coma corrector, "Paracorr", TeleVue. With Nagler 22 mm, you can use this telescope as a comet-seeker without Paracorr, though the image is obviously improved with it.

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