Spacers.

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denababy
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Spacers.

Post by denababy »

Hello all, another blue sky today (Monday 22nd Oct 2018) but the seeing was not good. Anyway I usually have my diagonal on (fitted with a Baader cut filter 2”) and everything is OK, but after watching some videos I decided to try Imaging without the diagonal, in a straight through type set up, just the same as the setup on Marty Wise video which lasts about 51 minutes, I tried, no spacers then one two and finally three, I moved the Quark (also fitted with a 1.25 Baader cut filter : not in place when using the diagonal) in and out, you name it I tried it but could not get anything like focus. My scope is an Explore Scientific ed80 and each spacer measures 36mm. I see on Marty’s vid that he has 80mm spacer distance. I tried with three cameras using various numbers of spacers ( those cameras being Altair gpcam 8 ,a zwo 120 and a Grasshopper 3 174imx) and whilst all three worked fine when I put the diagonal in, none of them worked with the straight through setup, focus wise, I adjusted everything in Sharpcap 3.1 but to no avail. Has anyone got any ideas pleas. I want to try the straight through setup in the hope of getting slightly better data, as yet all I get is rubbish data. I measured the distance from the diagonal mirror to the end of the Quark where it is silver coloured and that is about 32mm approximately, my thinking there was to try to get the same distance using spacers, the collar that has three screws in that hold things such as the diagonal in place is 10 mm approximately. So I have measured as much as I can but cannot fathom this out. What am I missing?


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MalVeauX
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Re: Spacers.

Post by MalVeauX »

Heya,

I use much longer spacers. 80mm x 2 and 80mm x 2 + 50mm (210mm extension) on some of my scopes to allow focus to be reached. It varies with your focuser too. When I replaced the stock focuser on several scopes to GSO linear bearing focusers, I had to add more extension. The E.S. ED80 is a similar to scope, if I recall, to the Synta ED80, or a copy even, at 80mm F7.5. I replaced it's standard focuser with a GSO crayford. And I needed an 80mm & 50mm extension to reach focus (and still had 3cm of out focus with the tube to travel, so I could have used two 80's comfortable too):

Image

Two 80's (160mm) would reach focus. The 80 + 50 (130mm) reached focus at just over 3cm of the drawtube out.

The scope above is essentially the same scope you have.

Hope that solves it. I think you just didn't have enough extension. The diagonal usually is doing this, so when you remove it, it removes quite a lot and you need a lot of extensions to make up for it.

Very best,


denababy
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Re: Spacers.

Post by denababy »

Hi Marty thanks for the reply. I have managed to get two more Es spacers and putting all four together will give me 162mm as well as those I have a Revolution adapter that I use when putting my Canon camera onto The Es, that will give me about 35-40 mm that I can add if needed but at the moment the Sun is well and truly behind cloud, surprise suprise. Once I am able to test these things out I will post again with the results.


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