Lightbridge Part 4 - Mirror Mirror

Are we done yet?

Is it purple?  Is it blue?  It depends!

Almost!

That's not a scratch or blemish in the finish,
It's the flash lighting up the back of the dining
room chair.

Last year I was working on painting and cosmetic changes.  I finally got the tube clear coated sometime last fall, I can't remember when it was exactly but I am very happy with the results.

I had the scope out once or twice over the winter, but for the most part the scope sat unused for the duration.  Now that the weather is starting to get better and Table Mountain is just around the corner, it was time to get back into the project.

Adjustment

You don't realize some times how crazy your life has become until there is a significant departure from what had become the norm.

The last two years of my previous employment were 9 and 10 hour days followed by checking of email on my blackberry to an almost crack addict level of OCD. 

I turned in my blackberry on the 24th of May and the following weekend it felt strange, almost wrong, that I didn't wake up roll over and check email to see what had happened overnight.  In my mind I knew there was nothing wrong and infact this was a good thing. But I was conditioned to constantly check.

My Poor Neglected Blog

I am going to have to go through and re-tag a bunch of posts with the "neglected" tag since I seem to take so long between posts that I almost always start out lamenting the fact that I don't post enough....HA.

So its been what like 8 months or so since my last post.....that makes Lily 8 and a half months old now.

She is growing up so frighteningly fast.  It seems like she learns something new every week, its crawling now and she loves being chased.  She has so much energy that when she is crawling and I come up and crawl after her, she "peels out" with her legs working so fast that they just slide on the hardwood floor without making any forward progress.

In addition to Lily, there have been some HUGE changes in my life.

What Happened???

I was updating regularly, working on projects and generally being a good little blogger.

Then, poof gone.  Nothing for almost three weeks.

Two days old and already a deep thinker.

Well this is the reason:


This is my daughter, Lily Elizabeth Drew.

Born September 10, 2012 at 6:04am

9 lbs, 1.6 oz 19.1 inches long.

Full head of hair and happy as can be.

My wife and I heard, read, and watched all the horror stories about labor and delivery.  We didn't experience anything like that.  Keep reading for our story, be warned its long.

Lightbridge 3: The Paintening

There are two key parts to a good paint job.

Surface prep and patience.  Professional obligations (work) is a fine substitute for patience and can make waiting for the paint to dry seem to go quicker.  Plus its hard to touch the fresh paint when you are sitting in the office. :-)

My sample piece got another wet sanding with 2000 grit sand paper and then I hit it with clear.

I wet sanded again with 2000 and did another coat of clear.


 I am VERY happy with the results.

Lightbridge Mods Part 2

A productive weekend with the scope rebuild.

I started out by putting the foam on the truss tubes, I may still go with heatshrink eventually, but the foam was cheap and it works for now.

I started by laying everything out and making sure that my foam tubes were cut to the correct sizes.
Since I glued the seam with the Pilobond, they were solid tubes and the seam is pretty hard to see.

Meade 12" Lightbridge Mods

Last year on table mountain, I sold my beloved 10" Odyssey Compact.

I sold it to make room for and help finance a larger dob.  I dream of someday owning a 16" to 20" scope but for now I have settled on a 12" Meade Lightbridge that a guy in my astronomy club was selling.

The story is that the scope was damaged in shipping, someone picked up the pieces and pulled a Humpty Dumpty on it.  The base was replaced with what looks like a dobstuff base.  This was ultimately a pretty nice upgrade from the stock Meade base.  The bottom tube was a little dinged up but mechanically everything is in pretty good working order.