Oh dear?

*

Plans for my new saucepan at the tail end of my 7" refractor have been put on hold. Measuring the inside diameter, across the base with a vernier caliper, proved I had been much too optimistic. There was difference of 20mm compared to the 202mm OD main tube. The plan now is to open out the existing, thick plywood ring at the tail end of the OTA before shortening the main tube. 

I shall add a flat aluminium ring cut from sheet metal and then fix the focuser base ring on top. Any worries about the focused beam from the objective causing charring of the plywood can be safely ignored. The sun's image should never fall outside the usual metal baffles in the main tube. With an even bigger hole, to clear the truly vast FTF3545 drawtube, the risk falls to zero.

The fine weather has broken with dark cloud and a short, but visually heavy snowfall this afternoon. Fortunately it was soon removed by 38-40F temperatures and short sunny periods. It was never worth opening the observatory to do any solar observation or imaging today.

My pretty, new, ZWO120MC-S camera and tilting adapter have arrived. With the USB3 cable and my laptop I'm hoping for much shorter guiding demands. The tilter adapter they sent is actually a T-S example and cannot even be used with the ZWO! The adjustment knobs/thumbscrews would remove the finish and even some metal from the camera body long before it was able to be screwed up tight. 

So I have had to reverse the tilting plate adapter and have the adjustment knobs/thumbscrews facing forwards towards the telescope. A much longer T2:T2 adapter would have solved the clearance problem but would have required much fiddling in a rather small gap. 

Careful examination of illustrations of the "real" ZWO tilter suggests larger thumbscrews placed further apart. Why would the camera makers offer a tilting adapter which would not fit their own cameras? I shall have to email T-S to see what they have to say. I did order a ZWO. The thumbscrew heads are rather long and could easily be changed for alternatives. Once the required tilt is added the adjustment thumbscrews become largely redundant.

The camera works fine in SharpCap. With a truly impressive window size compared with the measly iCap 2.4. I tried it with the ultra wide angle "whole sky" lens just to get a live picture. The Neximage5 has been an irritating time waster from day one! Leaving aside its very poor and long outdated, technical specs. The constant disconnections at the pitifully loose cable socket has made its continuing use a complete and utter farce! I'm amazed my laptop doesn't have the "ERROR CAMERA LOST" burnt permanently into its screen! Even with careful cable dressing and secure fixing the damned Neximage5 would lose contact!

There is one very odd detail about the ZWO: While scanning quickly through the ZWO instructions it suggested that the 120 camera can only manage 60FPS during Preview. During actual recording this drops to only 20FPS. As I use SSD internal and external hard drives on my laptop I shall have to check whether the much lower recording speeds were referring only to "normal" HDD recording.

*