Category Archives: Projects

Mark 1 Potato Cannon

Posted on January 20, 2017 by james

Search youtube for potato cannon and you’ll find loads of examples. My son was keen to try building one so we came up with a plan to build this one from bits of pipe we had lying about. It didn’t … Continue reading →

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Astro EQ conversion of EQ3-2 (part 5)

Posted on October 17, 2014 by james

Once the RA motor mounting was sorted I started on the DEC bracket which is somewhat simpler, being made from a section of 4mm thick aluminium angle. Again there’s only one bolt for fixing to the mount, so the bracket … Continue reading →

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Astro EQ conversion of EQ3-2 (part 4)

Posted on September 12, 2014 by james

My new drills have arrived and I’ve now drilled all the holes for the RA motor mount. It looks a bit like a Swiss cheese. This is the “outside” face, with holes for the motor flange, the four mounting screws, … Continue reading →

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Astro EQ conversion of EQ3-2 (part 3)

Posted on September 3, 2014 by james

My pulleys and drive belts arrived today. I removed the grub screws and drilled out the 48-tooth pulleys to 6mm (from 5mm) in the lathe to fit the worm spindles and the 16-tooth pulleys to 5mm (from 3mm) to fit … Continue reading →

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Coronado PST filter mod for Atik 314L+

Posted on September 1, 2014 by james

In my previous posting about the mod I’ve done for my PST to move the BF5 closer to the sensor of my ASI120 I had an idea about doing the same for my Atik 314L+. I know this camera is … Continue reading →

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Coronado PST BF5 positioning mod

Posted on August 31, 2014 by james

A few days ago I posted about the problems with vignetting when imaging with a PST and decided that for me a solution might be to move the BF5 unit as close to the camera sensor as possible so that … Continue reading →

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Astro EQ conversion of EQ3-2 (part 2)

Posted on August 29, 2014 by james

I ordered some aluminium channel (1″x2″x1/8″) to make up the RA motor mount which arrived yesterday. I chose this size because there’s only one mounting hole for each of the normal aftermarket motors on the EQ3-2 and this would give … Continue reading →

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Astro EQ conversion of EQ3-2

Posted on August 27, 2014 by james

I decided today that it’s about time I extracted a digit and got on with converting my old EQ3-2 “Sky Scan 2001” mount to GOTO using Tom Carpenter’s rather nice AstroEQ box. Although I already have the aftermarket motors fitted, … Continue reading →

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Swimming pool solar heating system

Posted on August 24, 2014 by james

When we bought our current house quite some years ago, it had a reasonable size “in ground” swimming pool that was suffering a bit from lack of maintenance.  The re-made ground around the pool had settled over the years and … Continue reading →

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Another possible PST mod

Posted on August 14, 2014 by james

My PST has been repeatedly modded and now looks like this: (though now with the addition of a motor to the focuser.) I have been pondering of late however on the amount of vignetting that occurs when imaging and what … Continue reading →

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