January, 2007
I've had an on again, off again passion for astronomy, but never actually had a
good telescope until my wife bought me my 8" Newt for Christmas several years back.
The scope itself was nice and it had JMI encoders already installed on the Sky
View Deluxe mount. This was great for finding objects.
When I got interested in taking pictures of objects, I found that it would be nice
to have the scope automatically slew to an object and then track that object reliably
for a few minutes at a time. The obvious answer is to buy a Vixen Sphinx or Losmandy G11
mount, but I don't have that kind of cash!
So my solution was to add Meade Autostar capability to my existing SVD mount. Following
the advice on several of the pages listed on my links page, I was able to hadd the motor
drive system to my mount, which worked suprisingly well. A bit of advice here, buy the
shaft adapter/gear set from one of the suppliers. I tried to make my own and they worked
ok for a while, but not being a machinist by trade the adapters that I made were not 100%
true, eventually causing motor failure.
Below are a few pictures of my conversion:
