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I finally finished Hill Mount v3, so I put it to the test. I got the clearest phone-cam Saturn I’ve ever seen! Wobbles still exist if you touch the telescope, but the wobbles are much smaller now and go away if I wait a few seconds or use a short exposure time.
Before the wobbles settle down, if you take a picture with a big exposure time, the wobbles cause the image to have two Saturns.
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I took my new wooden-dowel telescope mount for a spin, and got pictures of Jupiter and Saturn with my high-power eyepiece!
I took many pictures, and a few videos. I also figured out how to control the shutter speed on my phone’s camera, and got many photos at 1/40s shutter speed. Using a smaller shutter speed takes the planets from blinding white blurs to circular colored blurs, I assume because it lets in less light.
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Update: I’ve learned about the existence of EMT conduit, which is steel so it’s much stiffer, cuttable with a handsaw, and most importantly way cheaper than the aluminum tubes I bought before!
The downside is it’s sized in nominal diameter, which means lying. The size “1/2 in” has an outer diameter of 0.706 in. But I’ve faced nominal diameter before and this time I’m prepared. Let’s try this.
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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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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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(Part 2 of my adventures with my 3D printed telescope!)
I printed a collimation helper and a basket! The collimation helper helped me find out that I thought I was collimated, but was actually misaligned. With proper collimation, I went out again and took this new picture of Venus.
To the eye, collimation didn’t seem like it did anything, because my telescope and its mount was just so wobbly it looked the same to the eye as before.
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