Now that I am a week into my liquid diet, I think its time to admit that this is happening. If you want tips for surviving a liquid diet I would be more than happy to help. However, its time to talk about The plan again. So the goal is to be able to go to the Grand Canyon Star Party as our first expedition this will happen next summer assuming all goes well. However I need a road map for my acquisitions. Things have been made more complicated by my insistence on a Losmadny G11 for my mount.
It suffices to say that the first purchases need to be the laptop and the telescope, these will be the biggest expenses next to the purchase of a new SUV at some point in the next year, probably next fall. But we can break it down even further, the main problem with building a telescope from scratch is that you will inevitably mess things up. You can have all the wishlists and planning that you want but your going to inevitably meet with the fact that Murphy's law goes double in Astronomy.
Your main enemy is the complexity of open loop tracking systems. Everyone solves this with a guide camera, however there is something much more insidious. I have often said I will never buy a used telescope mount and here is why,
This is as close to a precision mechanical instrument as you can get in our hobby, it requires knowledge of mechanical and electrical repair and it is very sensitive to the weight that you put on it. There is no way you can just flip a switch and let it do its work. It has to be coaxed and finessed into doing its job. You cannot loose patients with it, you cannot try to reason with it. You can only be patient and work with it. If you try to take it out of the box put weight on it and get it to track and point, you are probably going to destroy it.
This is the problem with mounts, they are a lot like cars, and this leads people to treat them like cars. That is to say that for the most part people treat there cars like shit. They assume that its going to work and when it does not they get frustrated and/or irate, when a car is a mechanical object and hence it must be maintained and taken care of, it does not need near the coaxing as an astronomical mount but the point is that you should not just abuse it and then expect me to purchase it.
So I am going to buy the mount first, take my time assembling it, powering it on learning to balances it, getting to know its nooks and crannies and when I am done I will buy a telescope and put it on the mount, but not before I have taken the time to understand this object. After the mount then I will probably by a Camera, then the telescope and guide scope package. The laptop will also go in there somewhere since it is just a very useful object to have around. And once that is all acquired there will be test runs in my back yard then maybe in Tucson. The reason not to just get into my truck with a new scope and take it to a dark site is simple, it won't work. The scope won't work, the trip will probably be a disaster.
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