Joe's 16" LX200 GPS and 14 foot Dome

Astronomy Telescopes Optics Accessories

Joe's 16" LX200 GPS and 14 foot Dome

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Joe's Telescope and Dome system is being put together from available parts. The Dome will be a 30 year old 14 foot ASTRO-TEK dome that i found in New York rusting around in some ones back yard.

Palomar style SLIT 14.3 foot Dome.

This will need modern motorized rotation and slit control.

SIP Wall Insulated Building

The 14 foot Dome will go on top.

The observatory building is made from some left over SIP wall panels. These panels are 4 feet high and 10 and 14 feet long. You can usually get these as extras or left overs if you contact a SIP wall making company. These came from a RENO, NV. construction site. The price for each panel was about 150$ and you need the foam insulation heat cutter and some of the really long 12" screws to hold it all together. The door is a 4 foot piece cut right out of the lower SIP walls.

Meade 16" lx200 GPS Cass will go inside.

Exteranl parts will mount to the telescope.

This is the standard Meade Corporation 16" lx200 GPS with heavy duty tripod. I looked at the many Wedge devices on the market and found that it might be possible to just have some plates sheared at the steel store and weld them up to make the TILT-ABLE WEDGE. So far it does not seem to vibrate or tilt under the 200 lbs of LX200. The fork of the LX200 is the worst part of the scope. After alignment of the wedge at the north pole I found that the fork dropped 1/2 degree when i mounted the actual telescope assembly.

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Home made 1/4

All Steel sheet welded to make a WEDGE.

The back end of the LX200 will be this combination of FLIP mirrors, Ao-7 jitter tracking module, another FLIP pick-off mirror, 1.25" electric filter holder, and finally thet ST 8e CCD camera make up the main optical imaging system.

The first filp mirror allows you to open the optical axis strait into an eyepiece, camera or other detector system if you want to mount it strait out from the cassigrain back focus. I also put in a flip mirror to allow the viewer to use 2" eyepiece's at the strait out view port.

The light then passes off the first flip mirror to the AO-7 jitter control SBIG unit. This light reflects through another FLIP mirror to the filter holder and the finally the CCD and tracking camera.

If in the future you want to use the jitter control AO-7 unit to track on the ST8e tracking 237 ccd chip you can divert most of the on axis

light off a flip mirror to my fiber spectrograph pickup point. I plan to

cut the second flip mirror so that some of the incoming light will go to the 237 ccd tracking chip. It would be possible to also change the flip mirror with a Beam Splitter mirror of about 50/50 so you can strack and keep the light image on the end of a small 200 micrometer fiber that feed the spectrograph.