Dunsink Observatories New Outreach Telescopes.

HI Guys,

Great time at Dunsink observatory yesterday with all the students and the management of Blackrock Castle Observatory.

While I was there I managed to get the Observatory up and running with all their new telescope equipment for the clubs that use the facilities. The observatory had a very old Celestron celestar 8” schmidt-cassegrain telescope that was in awful condition. We managed to save the OTA and get it back into perfect condition. We took the OTA of the celestar altazimuth mount and added a dovetail bar, now the OTA is working on a brand new Celestron Advanced equatorial VX mount which has permanently programmable periodic error correction. Also you can image across the meridian without doing a meridian flip witch is very handy. To make things really convenient for the users we also added the Celestron StarSense Accessory, so there will be no need to align the telescope. Just point the telescope at the stars come back in two minutes and the scope will be aligned for you.


This photo shows the StarSense Accessory attached to the OTA




We also had the challenge of getting the observatories Solar Scope back up and running. What we did there was to take the solar scope off the broken altazimuth mount. We ended up putting the scope on to a Celestron CG4 mount then added a motor drive system to the mount so it will be well able to track the Sun all day long.



It was great working alongside Dunsink Observatory on this project now they also have some cool state of the art equipment to go along with the 12" Grubb Refractor.

Clear Skies,

Scopes and Space Team