Monday, December 1, 2008

First upgrade of the Coulter - The Cell

After reading up on the Coulter on Cloudynights.com and on Kirk Mona's excellent Coulter Odyssey web page (http://www.silverbugstudio.com/kirk/coulter/index.html), I decided to upgrade the primary mirror cell and focuser first.

The cell came from JStar which is a one-person operation based in California. The cell is fairly heavy duty, but very easy to adjust and to install. 

All of the photos of the cell and spider are here:

After the installation of the cell, the scope looks like this:



Because of the dramatic reduction in the weight of the scope's cell, the balance was changed so I needed to add a couple of hand weights to the scope to rebalance it.

The new cell dramatically improves the cool down times of the scope. I can start observing less then half an hour after taking the scope outside. Whereas before, I would have to wait 2 hours or so before observing.

All of the photos of the scope with cell are here:

Ambrose

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