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Author Topic: Make Your Dobson Newtonian Go Virtual By Jürgen Hilmer - January 2021  (Read 1861 times)

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Download attached file about attaching a camera to your Dobsonian Telescope for quick astrophotography.
The wording is here, but the attachment has the images also.

Make Your Dobson Newtonian Go Virtual
By Jürgen Hilmer - January 2021
Many are Zooming to share during the current crisis. Turn your Dobson Newtonian telescope
into a zooming scope. Email and share your images with others. The Dobson Newt with its
rocker box mount came around many years ago. To get your Newt to shoot photos of bright
night sky objects and to send them to others (like the Moon and some planets) all you need is a
2X Barlow. If fainter objects are the target, an equatorial platform placed under the Dobson
Newt rocker box mount can be of help.
The 2X Barlow like a Celestron Ultima, unscrewed, works. Install the optical chrome barrel into
a camera (Canon T4i) body cap. Since the optics are closer now to the camera sensor, the
Barlow becomes a 3X. The above process makes it possible to focus on night sky objects
without rebuilding the inside of the telescope tube. No getting the secondary mirror closer to the
primary mirror, or cutting a new hole for the focuser. A scope like a 1500mm f4.5 with a 330mm
(13”) diameter mirror is an example.
To photograph the fainter objects, which need longer exposure times, an equatorial platform is
needed. This platform fits under the rocker box mount. It keeps the target object in the field of
view and on the camera sensor for about 30 minutes. After that, pulling on the platform resets it,
and it is good for another 30 minutes of tracking. The Osypowski equatorial platform and others
are on the used market; kits are sold, and many sites help in building your own.
In a previous article find some helpful information on more scopes, cameras, and sharing
images:  http://www.sbau.org/201219%20Jurgen_Article.pdf  "Share Images Your Telescope Sees With Others" by Jürgen Hilmer, December, 2020
Please refer to the following three sites for some of the best information.
1. The Barlow Lens:  https://britastro.org/node/15666
2. EQ Platform (Link in left panel of page):  http://www.reinervogel.net/index_e.html?/Artikel_e.html
3. Tom Osypowski Equatorial Platform:  http://www.equatorialplatforms.com/

To sit with and contemplate how huge 13.8 billion light years is, and how tiny Planck time is, and
now add a pinch of EPR Entanglement, and all this only known to us for the last 100 years. Ah,
how inspiring a Dobson Light Bucket can be!
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