Mount for the 94mm f6 refractor
| Here is a closeup of the
refractor attached to the piggyback mount. The mount is
designed to serve a number of purposes. First it needed
to for attaching the small refractor to my 10"
LX-50. Also, I needed it to serve as a precision focuser
for the small telescope. This allowed me to avoid having
to attach my camera to a rack and pinion focuser which
could possibly flex or cause vignetting on the film. The refractor was made from a high-quality acromat lens. I mounted the lens in a plastic tube. The tube has a series of baffles inserted to increase the image contrast. With this system I can relatively wide-field photographs on 35 mm film. The only difficulty with this system is that when guiding with the LX-50, care has to be taken to prevent mirror movement during the exposure. |
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| The mount uses 1" x 1" square aluminum channel that is 24" long for the structural backbone. The aluminum channel is 1/16' thick, is very light and very stiff. To attach it to the LX-50, strips of 1" wide and 0.125" thick aluminum were used. These strips were 5" long and were bent to match the curve of the LX-50 OTA. Holes were drilled in the aluminum strips to match the equipment mounting holes in the LX-50. The aluminum strips were then attached to the aluminum channel backbone at the locations shown in the figure. Each strip was attached to the channel with three #8 screws to prevent any movement. Two additional aluminum strips were bent into a V shape with flattened bottoms. These are used to attach the refractor to the mount. The flat bottom of the V was attached to the structural backbone with 4 #8 screws. A screw is used to attach each end of the V to the 4" refractor tube. A view of the entire mount, showing the focuser on the left is shown below. | ||
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| The focusing mechanism uses a fine threaded screw to push a platform that holds the camera back and forth. The platform is made from a 6" length of aluminum channel. This platform rides on top of the backbone of the mount. A cross-section of the focuser is shown below. The height of the platform was selected to ensure that the centerline of the camera focal plane matched that of the telescope. After the complete mount was assembled, it was painted black to match the Meade Telescope. | ||
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| To see this figure in greater detail, use your mouse to select the image and view it in its own frame. | ||
