The Return of the King…

It’s alive, it’s alive…  Temple 28, the 11″ Celestron CPC Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope is back working again. The North-South autoguiding function still does not work but if it is polar aligned well that won’t matter!

The big issue is the dirty mirror! Having holes for ventilation is hard on a mirror.  I did not want to ruin the good collimation so I used 91% alcohol in a spray bottle to spray on the mirror through a ventilation hole and clean it off. It helped a little but didn’t clean it off like it should. so I added a drop of liquid detergent to the alcohol and that did the trick…as long as you then wash it off with distilled water. There was a streak under the focusing tube so I resprayed it with the alcohol/soap mix. Then promptly forgot to spay it with distilled water. So there is a film of dried soap on it. Now I have to do it all again when I get home from a trip.

It is good enough to plan to resurrect the scope. Have to set up a new 32 bit computer to run the SBIG ST-8E. The old parallel port camera won’t work with a 64 bit computer. However, a single core computer runs mount and camera just fine so my dual core desktop should work well. I also purchased a PCi parallel port card that has reviews showing it uploads 3x faster than a built in port. When it takes 70 seconds to upload one image this is important!

Hope to get this bad boy back up and running in the next month or so!