Telescope is back in the observatory

Shifting the monster is never easy.. and this is the only reason why i 'want' to avoid public sessions with my C14 and Titan mount but could never avoid to avoid this want.

An off day provided the opportunity to ​ put back everything where it truly belongs.. i still have to figure out some cables issues and want to put back the main CCD setup at the telescope.

After attaching Lunt halpha telescope with the C14 OTA, i got a quick look at the sun.. and immediately saw a huge prominence where the arc was attached to the solar surface on both sides. I thought i must image it. So i installed imaging source DMK21 camera with this scope and carefully tuned the pressure tuner and focuser and quickly grabbed a few movies. Here are the results.. not bad!

Astrozap white light Solar Filter

In the past, I have been using Thousand Oaks Solar filter which does not work so good when it comes to high resolution viewing of the Sun.

Thousand Oaks filter is made of glass and is an off axis filter. C14 telescope is too big to have a full aperture front solar filter because although solar filters drop the sunlight and solar heat way down, still in a big aperture telescope like C14, the amount of heat would generate too much temperature instability which will degenerate the solar views. That is the reason, probably no one makes a full aperture front plate solar filter as big as C14 can use.

Unlike Thousand Oaks, Astrozap uses solar film in their filters. Solar film filters have an advantage over glass filters when it comes to high resolution viewing and imaging of solar surface granulation. Though glass is much more durable than a film. It's hard to take care of solar film filters. But film can easily be replaced with a new one; these are not so expensive.

So the new upgrade is of the New Astrozap Film Filter for my C14 telescope! The off axis filter makes C14 essentially a 6 inch refractor scope. With the central obstruction of the secondary mirror gone from the view, this scope can provide very high resolution of the sun's surface.

In the image, you can see Astrozap white light Solar Filter attached on the front Schmidt plate of C14.

Telrad view finder

I always wanted to have this!

Finder scopes are essential for long focal lengths telescopes since they provide much bigger field of view than the telescopes these are attached with. Telescopes are almost impossible to align without the help of finder scopes.

A finderscope is itself a small refractor telescope that show a few degrees of the sky. Almost all of the finderscopes come with crosshairs that accurately points the telescope to a particular object (bright stars in most cases).

With my C14, 9*50 finderscope comes as standard. Recently I forgot to cover the finderscope while imaging/viewing the sun. Something got messed up in there and I was having very blurred views. I ordered a new finderscope from Celestron which came with 8*50 specification. Works fine for me.

But then no finderscope is Telrad! Telrad is very smartly designed finderscope. It projects three red illuminated rings of 1/2, 2 and 4 degrees field of view on the sky through its glass plate. With finderscopes, one has to put the eye on the eyepiece, as any telescope is visually used, but not with Telrad. The beauty of this thing is that it can be used to view way back anywhere, from a reasonable distance, now that is very nice.

C14 is a huge OTA (optical tube assembly) which on an equatorial mount as big as Losmandy Titan proves very hard to align with a finderscope. Finally today i recieved my Telrad in the mail and I am sure Telrad will make aligning the scope so easy for me.