Who I'm Reading Today

Since my early October post:

I've been getting up to speed working as (very) part time IT and website support for Lyndon Township. It's interesting and pretty straightforward. I did need to call their paid support a couple of times to get the admin rights on their domain that I'm supposed to have. I had a couple of things I didn't do correctly, but I think I'm on track now.

I'm working on a pretty large project for the choir I'm in; scanning the entire music library. J.S. is working on this as well. I've dragged out an old Epson Workforce printer that only really works as a scanner, and have been using that - it's a lot faster than my old flatbed.

I've got probably something like 40 to 60 hours of scanning in by now and am just over half done. I am probably underestimating that time, I'm putting in 4+ hours a day and have been for weeks.

I've been going a bit overboard on the astronomy front. First I bought a mount for the Maksutov that I've had for years. It shipped on a little table-top mount, I wanted something a bit nicer. I found this mount for $300, which is a heck of a deal. It connects via wifi to a tablet and not only tracks but does full go-to.


The Makustov optical tube is very sharp. I had it out last night, again the seeing was terrible, but it was getting stars to pin sharp focus, and Jupiter was sharp as well. Little maks are known for good stellar/planetary views.

Windycon 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the accepted "formation" of General Technics. I spent the weeks leading up to it prepping a couple of decor items for the GT room. First, the beach ball monster/pet from Dark Star, which hung out on the bed in the suite:


And secondly, a cake topper. It has all the circuitry for 24 LEDs on a circuit board that spins around at about 10 to 15 times per second and displays the GT logo, the phrase "50 YEARS!" and a graphic of a ray gun, rendered in glorious 96x24 resolution. It's also nearly impossible to take a good photo of. But a whole lot of people tried, so I call that a success.


On the 12th I found a first-generation Meade 8 inch LX200 telescope over in Grand Rapids for a reasonable price. Generally the guidance on this is to not pay more for the whole telescope than you would for just the optical tube, since the mounts are at this point 30+ years old electronics and are not known for super reliability. I got it for just about the right price I think. About 20% of what they sold for new and that's not accounting for inflation.

I've gotten it out once and though the seeing was terrible that night (turbulent atmosphere) I was pretty pleased with the view of the Orion nebula that I got. The optics, at least, are good and the electronics seem to work well. All I really did to it was to replace the capacitors in the hand controller (a known failure point) and buy some stuff - a new diagonal and a dew shield - and made a way to power it off a USB power bank.

Finally, just a few days ago, I caved on a telescope that's been on marketplace for weeks. I've been watching it for 6 weeks. It's the telescope that I was thinking of building. But this scope went for less than I'd have to pay for just the mirror. An 18" f/4.2 mirror is in the $6000 range. I paid less than that for this whole scope.
The mirror does show signs of being 15 years old - lots of little pinholes in the coatings. I can get it recoated, but honestly I don't think the coatings are bad enough to merit that for now. Probably in a year or so.
It looks a bit manky in this photo, but that's because I just pulled it out of the truck when I got home and tossed it together enough to roll it into the garage.


It needs some cleaning up. It's got some accessories that I'm not sure I really want. There's a wifi box that allows it to connect to a phone for navigation. It's got every dew heater known to science. I'm starting by pretty much removing all that stuff; when I had my 15" I had a navigation box, and I honestly never used it.

One thing that's clear to me having gotten most of these scopes out, is that I need to refamiliarize myself with the sky. I have a heck of a time finding alignment stars for these. Particularly the LX200, it has a VERY small number of alignment stars.

Also I need to get a better optical finder on the LX200, the stock one is pretty bad. And I need to get a red dot on there as well.