Hill's Space

Telescope upgrade 2: Electrical tape and openocular phone mount

 |  2 min  |  400 words
my telescope base now with these upgrades.
Venus again!
the open ocular phone mount

(Part 3 of my adventures with my 3D printed telescope! Previous part)

I tried adding 3 upgrades, but only two of them worked. Check out an amazing moon photo below!

Upgrades

My mount is very wobbly. To reduce the wobble I had two ideas: first, place wooden dowels along the diagonals of the sides to make the mount more rigid, and second, print an openocular.com phone holder so I didn’t have to touch the telescope to take pictures with my phone and wobble it.

  1. I bought three more wooden dowels, then I designed two versions of 3D printed pieces to hold the diagonals in place. After printing, they didn’t fit my base. I forgot to account for the fact that there were plastic parts at the top and bottom of the pipes that would stop me from attaching them there. In the end, I just taped the dowels to the mount using electrical tape. I think it worked pretty well to make the telescope rigid, but it didn’t stop the wobbling.

  2. The openocular.com phone mount is a 3D printed piece that lets you place a phone up to an eyepiece. That works for me, because that means I can place my phone in there then step back and the telescope’s wobbles will settle down! It still wobbled, but the wobbles died down after a while. Nice.

The mount itself is very fiddly, and it doesn’t help that if I see black through my phone, I can’t tell if the mount is aligned wrong and my phone isn’t pointed in the eyepiece, or if the mount is aligned correctly and the telescope is just pointed at dark sky. It’s also hard to focus with the mount on because the phone will also try to autofocus.

  1. The open ocular and eyepieces are heavy, and plastic on plastic is slippery. If I put the open ocular on, the entire telescope rotates down because of the weight. To fix that, I unscrewed and adjusted the position of the center piece on the rods until it balanced. But I also added some electrical tape to the curved circular rockers, to make it less slippery, and that was a massive improvement. Now the telescope stays in place much better. I wholeheartedly recommend doing this.

Using all these upgrades, I took this picture of the moon using the phone mount.

Wow! You can see so many craters!

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