09/15/2003

I've managed to motorize the wooden mount by having a couple of bearing blocks and a couple of shafts machined. The motors are designed for the Meade DS-series of telescopes and are controlled by the Meade Autostar 497 controller. I'm not the first to discover these motors -- see Steve Bedair's DS-Powered Mounts (which is where I got the idea). The motor and Autostar set was $200, which is probably cheaper than I could have home-brewed something for and saved me the time and trouble of writing my own control software.

So I now have computer control and GOTO capability. But the wooden mount's construction is not very accurate so the GOTO pointing precision is poor at the moment. Still, if I start by selecting a nearby bright star and manually re-zero when the star is centered, the GOTO accuracy will let me wander in the neighborhood (say within ten or twenty degrees) and still get the target object in the field of view of the 26mm eyepiece. Good enough for now, I guess.

This page copyright (c) 2003 - 2004 by David A. Wallace.