A couple of weeks ago I was camping at New Bern KOA. It has a dock on the east side of the Neuse River. So you have a good view of the western sky. Of course New Bern gives off lots of light pollution but I was able to image the comet with my Pixel 9 Pro phone. It does a pretty good job of astrophotography. I was not able to see it with my eyes but I knew about where it was in the sky. I pointed there and took lots of pictures till finally there it was.
I took the GoPro out to capture a Star Trail and it came out pretty good. I have Polaris just out of frame and the moon made an appearance before the battery died.
Here is a still from the video. the video will be below.
I have a solar filter
It took a couple of orders to get the right one. I have the Nexstar 130SLT from Celestron. I saw that amazon had just a couple of filters left while Celestron had none. This is the Celestron Filter just bought thru Amazon. Right after ordering it it went out of stock. It arrives like a week later. I look at it and I am like this packaging appears too small. It should cover the entire opening. Looking at the box it has the right label? But opening it up and this is what I have.
This is incorrect. It should look like the normal cover for the tube which is this. Sent it back to Amazon as I can't use it.
I am bummed as it is now out of stock. It is caused by the fact that there is a total eclipse coming up.
I am looking at the list of filters and I see one for AstroMaster 130EQ. Which is basically the same telescope as mine. It has a different tripod and is a slightly longer tube but what is important is the 130 which is the mirror size which directly relates to the tube size. It looks exactly the same size since the tube is the exactly the same size width wise. The filter is even cheaper then the solar filter specifically for my telescope. That is strange since it appears the same.
I order it up as they only have a few left of that one. It shows up and yes it is the same and fits the nice and snug. It arrived during the week. To try it out I had to wait till today.
Once the sun was up high enough this morning and the sky was clear I go out and lets play, Of course I need to figure out how to align the goto mount to the sun. Normally you have to align it to three stars but it is daytime nothing up there but the sun that is visible. I find out the Sun option is hidden since they don't want you to just try and align to the Sun without a Solar filter. So I unhide the Sun option and now I have the option to align to the Sun.
But you can't look at the Sun. No finder scope is on the tube as you can't look at it directly. If you don't have the finder scope no one will be tempted to look thru it. The way to align is much like a sun dial. You align the Suns shadow till it is absolutely the smallest it can be. Once you get it like that you then slow align it by looking in the eye piece. Now the goto mount will track the Sun.
I look and see Sun Spots! Neat.
I have the Celestron NexYZ – 3–Axis Universal Smartphone Adapter. It is not perfect but it makes using your cell phone to take photos easier. It is nearly impossible to hold your phone at the eye piece. This enables you to adjust x, y, and z over the eye piece to get the phone in the right position. As simple as this sounds it does take some adjustment to get the camera lens over the eye piece to see what is there.
So the next two pictures are about 30 minutes apart.
I also took a 10 minute video and sped it up to only be 35 seconds long.
I need to keep at this as often as possible so I know all the ins and outs of both doing Solar viewing and getting the most out of the cell phone adapter as I can't afford a DSLR at this point. Time is ticking for the Solar Eclipse. Only one shot to get anything of that so no room for errors. I need to be able to get some shots right!
The drawback to a Newtonian telescope is that you have to align the mirrors. So how do you do that?
There are some ways to accomplish this. You can use a laser collimator or a Cheshire eyepiece.
The laser collimator shines a laser into where you put the eye piece. The laser then hits the secondary and then the primary and then returns the same way.
The Cheshire is basically crosshairs you sight down and line up the mirrors.
Both methods work. But I decided on the laser device. To be exact the Svbony model. So when you use a laser the laser needs to be lined up and down the center of the eyepiece holder. You would think that that is a simple thing right. No the laser collimator also needs to be collimated.
This laser is in a 1.25 inch form but comes with a 2 inch adapter if you can only use that. In the picture above you can see the target that the laser needs to hit in order for the mirrors to align.
I decided that two times the focal length which is about 60 inches would be my target distance for the laser to see how far off it was. So I built a quick and dirty jig to hold the collimator. Just a small wood board with nails at 45 degrees to hold it. It does not need to hold it straight as all you care about is if the laser makes a tight circle ideally it does not move. You check this by making 1/4 turns and then marking a piece of paper where the laser hits. If you are OCD it is just the same spot. If you are not OCD maybe you allow it to vary a bit. But 10mm circle was a bit more then I wanted.
If you are wondering what is the deal with the blue tape? Well when they make the collimator they want it to fit in the 1.25 inch hole but not super tight. So when in the telescope it is loose and when you tighten the screws to make it more snug it is now slightly off center. A trick is to wrap blue painters tape around it and overlap it a bit. Then you run a razor knife down it to cut thru both layers. Remove the loose end then take apart the over lap and remove the piece underneath and place it back down with no overlap at all. It is a neat trick to make sure that all you do is increase the width without having any overlap. Now it is a snug fit it is perfectly centered.
When I checked how centered it was out of the box it was 10mm off. So I had to dig out the stuff they seal the adjustment screws with.
So once that was out it took me some time to actually get it centered. I was not keeping track of what I was doing too well plus I had to figure out that if you move one hex screw out you need to move one hex screw in. After resetting a few times I finally started just doing 1/8 turns out on one and 1/8 turns in on another. Eventually it just about dead on. Good enough for this guy.
I then went and collimated the scope by first aligning the secondary mirror once that was done then I aligned the primary. After struggling with the collimator doing the telescope was simple.
Now I wait for clear night sky's. Which have been gone since I collimated the telescope. Isn't that how it always is.
Hello there my name is Jim and I just received a nice beginners telescope for Christmas. It is a Celestron Nexstar 130SLT Computerized Telescope. 130 is the primary mirror size in mm or in inches 5.11811. The focal length is 630mm or 24.8031 inches.
You can click the link above to learn more about it. But here are the basic points.
It comes with some basic eye pieces. 25mm and 9mm. the 25mm which is 25x and 9mm which is 70x. You find the power of an eye piece by dividing focal length by the eye piece.
630/25 = 25.2
630/9 = 70
You can figure the maximum power it can go to reliably by doubling the primary mirror size 130*2 or 260x is the highest you should use.
Since this is a Newtonian Reflector it has the primary mirror at the end of the tube and a secondary mirror to bring the image to the eye piece.
