Month: July 2006

Well, after spending a lot of time remachining the bar on which I mount the cameras to give me better control over where they are mounted left-right, I concluded I didn’t have a balance problem to start with. The pier is not vertical so when the counterweight bar settled it appeared I was overweight on …

Unbalanced – Not!Read More

No, not me (well…), it’s my scope. I loaded everything onto my MI-250 as planned for next week and discovered I can’t get a good balance left-right (uhm, declination). It’s that 300mm f/4 lens on the Pentax 67. I had a clever idea that suffered the same fate as many of my clever ideas—it didn’t …

UnbalancedRead More

This post is coming after a long set of troubleshooting exercises along with what is hopefully a happy ending. The Canon-supplied software for computer control of the camera will only talk to one camera at a time. You can’t even launch two instances of it. Aaarrgh! Well, actually not that bad since I wasn’t planning …

Canon DSLR + ImagesPlusRead More

Well, I contacted the seller of the camera about my problems and he said he had a similar problem, also with his laptop, and the problem was the parallel port. The troubleshooting guide also mentions that as a warning and says some people have reported problems with IBM laptops. Of course, I have an IBM …

SAC 8-II Woes, Solution?Read More

I purchased a used SAC 8-II off astromart a few weeks ago after which it promptly sat in the box apart from a cursory examination. The intent was to use it as a light-weight autoguider. I quickly installed the software and "tested" it without being attached to anything. I was getting a signal out of …

SAC 8-II WoesRead More