From: "Duane" <macastronomer@mac.com>

Date: October 21, 2005 7:48:09 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: Grid Pattern

I'm pretty pleased with Meade's focuser. It has 4 speeds and the slow is really slow. It 

worked pretty well.

On the Orion I have a Moonlight crayford focuser ( I think that's what it's called). It's 

manual but it has two focus knobs, one for gross and one for fine focusing. It works really 

well.

Since I got better results with the 8" meade I probably won't be using the manual focuser 

on the Orion for planetary imaging for some time.

My new camera came today and I finally have all the parts I need. Too bad I have all the 

clouds to go with them. Oh, well. I'm going to go home and play with them any way :)

Duane

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Alan Friedman <alan@g...> wrote:

On Oct 21, 2005, at 5:51 PM, Tim wrote:

Since my 9.25" is mounted in the roof of my house, I'd have to run up 

and down the ladder

to fine focus, so I sought a motorized focuser.  After looking at the 

various options, and

realizing that most (all?) of the motorized crayfords probably have 

cords  that are too

short, I bought a Robofocus. 

A good focuser is a must. My 10" mak has a beautiful belt driven moving 

mirror mechanism which works very well - but I found that in the middle 

of winter it was really difficult to move. I bought a feathertouch 

crayford with the dual speed pinion - it was a huge help. At f48 for 

jupiter the CCD chip covers a couple of arc minutes. Any image shift is 

no fun. The robofocus has an excellent reputation too but I try and 

have as few electric things around as I can manage!

Alan