Accident! Ed Destroys a Telescope. Total Loss!

so as you can see there was an accident it was my fault the scope got dropped now what makes this even worse is this wasn't my telescope well you know now it is I'm I'm paying him for all of this this was the telescope of a club member who loaned it to me because I wanted to do something with with it what is it well it's a me 10in F4 Schmid neonian from the early 2000s what is a Schmid neonian well now this is my third Schmid neonian I've reviewed here it's become sort of a minor specialty of of mine I guess but a Schmid Newtonian superficially resembles a regular Newtonian except that the mirror is usually spherical spheres are much easier to make than parabas and so your quality control should get a little bit tighter spherical mirrors do yield a lot of distortion and so what they do is they put a Schmid corrector plate on the front which corrects for the aberration now properly executed a Schmid Newtonian should yield between 40 and 50% less Distortion than a similar regular conventional Newtonian that's in theory of course in practice things get a little bit strange Schmid newtonians were never produced in large numbers and because of that the quality control and the mass production numbers and so forth never really clicked into place these are sort of a niche telescope me made a couple of runs at these back in the 1990s and 2000s I don't know if they're going to try that again Schmid newtonians got a bad W because some of them appeared in lowcost units and I don't know why anybody would do that because it's a complicated design the Schmid corrector plate is doing all of the heavy lifting optically and it's not an easy thing to make so I I put the lens cap back on cuz I I just can't can't bear to look at this so this came from the era of me that was not their finest moment mid 1990s to Mid 2000s those were not good years for me they were one of the first people to really wholly Embrace this idea of going Offshore Manufacturing to these Asian countries today we expect this sort of thing but back then they didn't have it perfected they started Outsourcing this stuff and there were some questionable products that they sold during this time these included the lxd 300 and lxd 500 mounted telescopes the Ed series refractors on lxd 650 and lxd 750 mounts and they were starting to push the DS series pretty heavily at that time also but no product in that era Sparks the IR and hatred of amateur astronomers quite like the lxd 55 and lxd75 mounts which have a well-deserved reputation for being some of the worst equatorial mounts ever made now because of that these Schmid newtonians got a bit of a bad W some of them left the factory in questionable condition some of them were not well columnated and cating a Schmid neonian is not a trivial task you can cumate it like a conventional Newtonian but there's a little bit of tweaking that has to be done should you wind up with one of these I will put some instructions below a link to somebody who will tell you how to cumate a Schmid neonian I usually don't try to touch that and in fact the owner of this one wound up paying a dealer to do it for him now the owner of this tell of this one tells me that when he bought it he bought it new from a dealer the lxd75 mount lasted by his estimation a grand total of less than 5 seconds and it never worked again after that as a result when you see these things out in the field they usually resemble this that is number one they are an optical tube only because the mounts have long since departed us and number number two they have been modified some of the hardware that came with this thing stock out of the factory was questionable the owner of this one took off their corrector plate and flocked the inside there's supposed to be a rubber type spacer between the secondary and the corrector plate so that you can have something to cinch up against you really don't want to loosen the secondary too much when you're cating it because the secondary can spin around now you've got to deal with that so when he went in and looked at that there wasn't a piece of rubber it was just a piece of parchment paper so he put a rubber gasket in there and things are cinched up quite nicely also the major thing is he changed the focuser the focusers from this blue steel era of me were really bad and in fact this is a Moonlight focuser it's quite beautiful and they actually had a line of these made specifically for mij newtonians because so many people were replacing the focusers on their stock units okay so the original idea here and I would still like to do this at some point is to try to gauge just how good these Schmid newtonians are by today's standards some of you may recall I did this review of this Orion 10in F4 conventional Newtonian a few months back and we got into a debate the guys and I did what's better a Schmid Newtonian or a conventional Newtonian with one of these this is a paracore and it's made by teleview and it slips in here like this and it corrects for aberration at the edges and cleans up the image according to tels literature this turns an F4 telescope into the Distortion that you would normally see in an f8 Newtonian that's pretty neat now there have been a couple of different versions of the paracore this is the type one tunable type there is a type two that they have right now and it's really a a remarkable device it will work in any Newtonian but it's best in fast reflectors and uh uh yeah the don't look up how much that thing costs okay so what happened I'll describe what happened to me in case you find yourself in this situation which I don't think you will because I'm thinking about this now I was probably in a fairly unique set of circumstances so this telescope is on and I don't know if you can see it a pair of Vixen compatible dovet tail plates the optical tube weighs 38 lb my G Mount only has a d plate saddle on it so because it has a d plate and this has a vixen plate we need an adapter to go between the two of them and the product that I use is this thing from losmandy I think they call it a VSP and there's nothing wrong with this product I've used it several times before but the largest telescopes and the heaviest loads I've put on here in the past were my fs102 and a C8 both of those top out at around 12 or 13 lb this is 38 lb it presents a much bigger load now when you see the way this fits inside the cge saddle plate there actually isn't a dovetail here you can see it's just a square sort of thing and the saddle plate clamps onto the side the actual amount of the point of contact between the cge and this is actually quite small it's only a millimeter or two it bites into the sides of this device now again for a 12 or 13 pound load it's not an issue it's very secure I'd never had anything this heavy on here before and I'm looking back I think it's probably the interaction between the weight of the telescope and the way this is designed and the way the C saddle plate is designed the three of them working together wound up creating an unfortunate situation making it even worse I was looking at the Orion Nebula at the time and it was telescope was positioned in such a way that everything was horizontal telescope on one side declination shaft horizontal on the other meaning that the lever arm the amount of torque that was placed on this thing was at its maximum and the adapter plate let go it took out a bunch of stuff that was underneath it I had a laptop that's been smashed I had a finder on this that fell to the ground and smashed and I also had my camera and my autog guer on there I'm testing those right now I think the auto guer is okay but the camera is exhibiting some strange behavior and there may in fact be some additional Fallout from the accident okay so what's next well sourcing a new Schmid corrector plate at this point is going to be impossible I'm not even going to try I did float an idea to the guys of just finding a secondary spider taking off the corrector plate and then just using this thing as a straight Newtonian at least it's getting used used now a spherical mirror at F4 one of the guys looked this up will yield a wavefront error of somewhere around five and 3/4 waves wow so when we discovered that all of the guys started mentally walking away from this project all of them of course except me I want to see that how bad is a telescope with five and 3/4 waves of error I mean would it throw up an image at all would it Focus I mean what are the edges going to look like I kind of want to see that so I might be able to talk the guys into coming back and helping me do that project maybe I can use it at Star parties but as it stands right now I put the check in the mail I just bought this telescope off the club member it kind of feels like I just bought a very expensive Moonlight focuser doesn't it okay so there you have it details of my accident thanks for watching everybody be safe out there and I'll see you soon

Channel: Ed Ting

Views: 19,752

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Id: LdXXMvNtUw0

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024