Another Mars shot from the Obsessionator!

Great shot of Mars. That is one serious piece of kit you have Dave.
I believe there is a 40AH version of the powerpack from Maplin (unless its a typo on their site).
Otherwise a marine battery may be needed to drive such a big scope.

A small wind turbine might help, say 500kW . Never mind me I'm just jealous .

I hear Rolls Royce have a spare Trent 900 engine from their orders on the Airbus A340-500 - should be up to the job.

Dave,
I wonder could you get any idea from the Servo Cat guys as to what they recommend for a battery and how much juice it uses etc?
I'm a bit concerned that the battery almost ran out at 2AM.
As you said your self 8 - 2 is only 6 hours and thats just not good enough.

I'm looking forward to seeing your images from the same lot.
The seeing was a good bit better alright but not perfect as you say.
It'll be interesting to see the difference between the two
I've learned a lot from you so far Dave so I'm always keen to see how you
process stuff!


Mike,
The visual image was..how can I put it...
(for me) superb.
I have never seen as much detail on Mars before through a scope.
The polar cap was hopping out, the albedo features were very obvious as was the bright area 'Chaos' (in fact it was brighter to my eye than in the image.

To be honest, the star of the show last night was the Moon.
Unless Dave wants to offer a more detailed explanation of what we say all I can say is anyone looking through a 20'' dob for the first time should have cushions on the ground just in case!

The views last night will stick in my mind for some time to come.

Frank,
I've been doing abit of reading on batteries and its worse then you might think, the battery in your charger is a sealed battery, you cannot discharge them below say 10volts or you'll reduce their lifespan, we were probabily on the very limit of where you could go with it, the Argo/Servocat can use a lower voltage but that low voltage will damage the battery.
The same applies to to the 40AH jump starter in Maplin (thanks John for letting me know they have it).

What I'll need is a deep cycle battery, the lowest power Ive seen for one of these is 110Ah which is perfect!, the only thing is that they are about twice the size of a normal car battery and cost abit more, BTW a normal car battery is no good either.
I used to have a car battery pack for the LX200 (and went through 2 car batteries in its time), the pack is long since retired but I'll be soon bringing it out of storage with a new deepcycle battery. Im conscous that I might want to put a mains converter in here also so a battery like that could easily drive it.
Servocat make no recommendations on power, they say how much power you need but its up to you to get it, they sell a mains transformer so thats their answer.

Lads,
I'm processing the images I have here and will hopefully put them up tomorrow if I get them finished.
I figured out a way of getting the binoviewer to work on the dob without cutting the truss poles, I put the 2-1.25" adapter on the inside (mirror side) of the focuser barrel so 2x barlow can get alot nearer to the secondary mirror.
The only problem with that is that the adapter/eyepiece screw have to be taken out so if you push too hard the adapter will be taking a 6 foot fall and will hopefully miss the mirror!, so great care is needed here.
On doing this the moon was just incredable with the 26mm+binoviewer+barlow giving 335x with 2 eyes, amazing detail!.

Frank,
I've been doing abit of reading on batteries and its worse then you might think, the battery in your charger is a sealed battery, you cannot discharge them below say 10volts or you'll reduce their lifespan,

:shock:
So thats why the last battery died a death in no time!
Arrrg.
I'll have to watch the power in future.