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Equipment in Use at Southend Bradfield Observatory

10" Mak-Cass Special made by APM

 10" APM Mak-Cass on Astrophysics AP900 Mount.

 

 

   The telescope is one of the first production 10" APM Mak-Cass specials. It has an excellent set of optics made by Intes-Micro and is corrected to 0.115 wave PtV and 1/30th wave RMS. To help thermal stability the primary mirror is made of Sital. The tube is made in Germany and is very professional. The tube is also lightweight to help maintain thermal equilibrium. The telescope focuses by moving the primary mirror.

On its first night it produced CCD images with the best resolution I have ever measured at 1.9 arcsecs FWHM.

The scope is mounted on an Astrophysics AP900. The AP900 is my main mount and has performed superbly since it was installed.

 

Business End of 10" mak-Cass

 

7" Mak-Cass made by STF

 

7" STF Mak-Cass on AP 900

 

 

I also have a 5" Takahashi refractor and an 8" Portaball telescope with a fabulous Carl Zambuto mirror.  

Previous Telescopes

 

12" LX200 OTA on AP900

 

 

AP900 Mount Errors

 

So how good is the AP900 mount? This is a raw plot of the errors:

 

 

This data was produced in July 2004 in September I used a better night to generate the following uncorrected data:

 

I then used the ST8 to train the PEC and got the following graph:

 

 

Unfortunately it clouded over so I could only get a few minutes worth of data.

 

 

 

 

Home

Latest Images

Messier 01-20

Messier 21-40

Messier 41-60

Messier 61-80

 

Messier 81-100

Messier 101-110