Equipment Upgrade to Celestron 14
Friday, September 3, 2010 at 9:37PM After looking for some time I finally managed to acquire a larger aperture telescope (from eBay) to support my supernova searching. It is a 30ish year old orange Celestron C14 Optical Tube Assembly. It is in excellent condition optically and like all C14s, extremely solid.
The orange tubed C14 OTA
The first thing I did was to acquire a pair of Ironwood Observatories "flop stoppers" from Oceanside Photo and Telescope in Southern California. These prevent mirror flop that had also been a problem with the Meade 12" which I had solved in a similar but not identical way. They can be quickly released to permit primary mirror focusing if required but I clamp them to prevent mirror movement and focus using the external focuser to prevent image shift.
From the T-Point model I established it indicated that the polar alignment was not correct. Instead of following the usual adjustments to the axes indicated by T-Point in terms of "tic" movement required on the ME I decided to use the tried and tested "Drift" method of alignment using CCD images with superimposed cross hairs. I spent a few hours of trial and error adjustment of each axis to minimise drift of the selected stars until a star was split by the cross hairs without drifting for at least 15 minutes on my 9.3 minute square image. The method is well described in this Sky and Telescope article.