Barndoor Enhancements

I have continued refining my barndoor mount.

I built a ball mount for the camera out of plumbing parts and a round wooden ball that was designed to be a drawer pull.

I built it with the help of my father in law (he has a drill press) and it works very well and is pretty sturdy but it has a pretty bad dead spot directly over head.

I didn't like this so I bought a RAM mount that is more flexible.  I suspect that the flexibility may be adding additional vibration to the mount as a whole.

I also picked up a mead 8x12 finder to help align it.

I made a mount out of a PVC connector and it works really well.

Preliminary field tests with both the new finder and the new mount have yielded satisfactory results, but my stars a blobby and I suspect that has to do with the new camera mount.

I plan on going back to the old mount which was much sturdier, and doing some further testing using the finder to  improve alignment.

I started this post last summer (I know I know) and while the PVC ball mount was sturdy, it prevented me from pointing my camera freely, the RAM mount, while nice, was far too squishy to use.

I purchased an Manfrotto 494 Ball Head  to replace the homemade ball mount.

You can see it in this picture along with the finderscope and mount.

Now I can point my camera anywhere in the sky.  I also purchased a new UWA lens for my camera as a birthday present for myself.

I picked up a Canon EF-S 10-22mm UWA.  I got a chance to use it at TMSP this year and I am pretty happy with the results, however I still need to work on my framing and my focus.  I was also pretty lazy with my shot settings and didn't really spend a whole lot of time twiddling with shot settings.

Here are a few examples from this summer: