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It didn’t work. The main type of wiggling I was trying to stop is the top part twisting around the z axis compared to the bottom part. This new mount stood up well, but if I placed the telescope on the mount and gave it a sideways nudge, the telescope would wiggle from side to side at a period of about 1/4 s. It does seem less wobbly than my previous square mount, but it’s still pretty wobbly.
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Starting to build telescope mount v2! I’m using 0.5in rods, and v1 had holes 0.52in wide. This one has holes 0.51in wide, and that was a mistake, it made getting the rods in there so much more annoying.
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I was unsure about how to model this part to make it non-wobbly so I looked up and watched a full lecture from MIT OCW about vibration reduction. it didn’t really help but now I understand that when you bend a stick, the outer part expands and the inner part shrinks and so by making bigger areas farther from the bending (weird) you can resist shrinking and growing a bit more.
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I put everything together for version 1 of my telescope truss mount. It stands! It was also an inch too wide for the telescope to properly rest on it. I had to rotate it the wrong way so it could fit on the stand for the picture. Aargh.
Some of the clamps did grip the rods well, some of the clamps didn’t. The base did feel pretty solid, but the top part is still pretty wobbly after full assembly.
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Came out with some blobs and very stringy, which isn’t good, but they came off with some pliers. Time to go cut my dowels to size and see if it all fits
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My 3D printed telescope has a problem: it’s very wobbly. That means it’s hard to point the telescope at a planet and have it stay pointed at the planet. It also means I can’t focus it well, or take good pictures through my phone.
The telescope itself is fine, but the mount is the problem. There’s a 3D printed mount included in the files with the telescope, and I built that 3D printed mount (after trial and error and discovering pipe sizes are a lie ).
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I woke up early and saw Jupiter and Saturn!
Thoughts on the observing: I have two eyepieces, a high power 6mm and a low power 25mm. I couldn’t get a picture of the planets with my high power lens because my mount is too wobbly and I couldn’t find the planets once I mounted my phone on the telescope. I did see Jupiter through it amidst the wobbling, and it looked like a featureless white blob.
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