"you need to know if your optical tube is front heavy or rear heavy"
When i asked some questions with regard to the best possible setup for astrophotography, especially with regard to the final approach while aligning an object, i was told to make sure that the optical tube is properly balanced. The nice people at cloudynights.com told me to remove the OTA and place it on a pencil with all the photography gear attached and to make sure that i mark the spot where the whole chebang is all nicely balanced.
So here we go with some pictures:
Step 1: Ask your wife to hold on to the OTA while you detach the OTA. My regular prism and eyepiece are still attached.
Step 2: Place the high tech balancing device (pencil) underneath the tube
Placing the pencil under the tube proved to be difficult because the whole setup was leaning to one side, towards me (due to the extra weight of the finderscope) and did not stay level on the table.
Step 3: Attach your photography gear and find the sweet spot
After some minutes of fiddling i think i found the sweet spot and marked it ( i had to get a second pencil : )) on the OTA. I first made a mark on the black rail that later "slips" into the mount and had to draw it again onto the tube because the mark of course got hidden inside the mount's base.
..and the result ?
Now that i have the tube back on the mount, i can see that it has moved quite a bit forward compared to before the balancing process. So it looks like it was quite a bit "rear heavy" before this procedure. The rail that is attached to the tube does not even stick out the end of the mounting base anymore. I'll add a picture that shows this later - my wife is waiting for me to watch another episode of Dexter together... ; )
here's the result. You can see that the tube has now moved quite a bit forward, leaving a gap.
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