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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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I woke up early to go see Jupiter and Saturn and turns out it’s still really really hard to align this telescope! I took videos in the hopes I’d catch at least one good frame, now to review them and see if that’s true. I got a decent video of Saturn in my low power lens, hope it shows up well as rings instead of fuzzy blob
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With all those upgrades, I was able to mount my phone to my telescope. Recently, the moon finally reached the right phase for it to be visible, so I got great shots of the moon!
With my 6mm high power lens, the moon was super duper detailed. And I realized something amazing: the moon was moving. I was so zoomed in I could see the rotation of the earth! That’s incredible!
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(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.
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