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Posted by Bob Sal on October 26, 2001 20:23:37 UTC

Well, they fixed that street light across the street. And when the leaves fall off the trees I got the other street light on the other side. Not to mention night lights and porch lights everywhere. What's an amature Astronomer to do. An expensive dome wouldn't help very much because when I open the top slit, you still have street lights in front of you. What I did is this. I bought two 4x4 x 12' posts and stick them in the ground. Then I attached 3 9x12 tarps to a nylon rope and strung 1 of them between them and the other 2 on the sides attached to the trees. When I open them like shower curtens they make a nice "U" shape about 9" high. That pretty much blocks everthing but the sky. I set the scope up in middle of the "U". It works real well. You can't see you hand in front of your face in there. There's nothing I can do about the light spilling into the sky, but with the tarps open I never look directly into the street light, I get no glare on the eyepiece and I get real good night vision going. It's not the best sight in the world, but about 50 degrees up, it gets pretty dark. I've seen 14th magnitude galaxies and planetary nebulars from time to time up there and the Andromeda Galaxy is a naked eye object. Never would see that with all that glare. The cost was $17 each for the taprs, $15 for the posts. $3 for the rope and another $5 or so for hooks and eye screws. When finished, I just scrunch them up aginst the polls and wrap a bungee cord around them. That's $3 for bungees. And finally, when open, I use 6 of those big screws you use to tie the dog onto, to hold the bottom of the tarp down, $9. I think that's under $100 right. There's plenty of room in there, I had two 12" LX200's in there one night. Anyway, it's like I allways say, make the best of what you have, don't complain about what you can't see, enjoy what you can see. That's the best I could do.
That's it;
BOB SAL

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