Ouch! I hope the blurred vision is only temporary, Erik- you have vision among the best of the observers I've met. Was it the Daystar, or the PST that was damaged? Seems like the club needs to have returned loaners audited, to avoid situations like this. The neat thing about the Weightless mount is that the front bearing can be a wheel instead of a pad- and that wheel can easily be driven by a motor. In fact all three bearings can be wheels. Ball-bearing wheels. Scaling it up for a larger payload won't be a problem. I'll elevate the arms and bring them closer to the azimuth pivot if needed. This probably won't be my next project. I'm just going to measure the objective focal lengths at the ATM session on Saturday. Knowing those will help direct other project details. BTW, I bounced my twin zoom eyepiece idea, as well as the weak Barlows for equalizing objectives of different focal lengths, off of Dave Trott in Denver. He said that he actually came to the same conclusion when researching and building his own large binocular a while ago. He went on to say that the objectives need not even be close in focal length, as long as you compensate with the eyepieces. Final magnification equalization is all that counts. On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 4:02 PM, <erikhansen@thebluezone.net> wrote:
Yes, it was a rotating ring assembly, quite ingenious actually. It may have been in Sky&Tel , I think it was also in a RTMC publication. Seems like a lot of weight for a "weightless" mount. my current problem is blurred vision is one eye, no binocs for me, I would like to thank the person who damaged SLAS's H-alpha.