Day Two

Today Ellen and I spend a lot of time trying to make sure the diagonal mirror (the little mirror that bends the focused light into the eyepiece) is correctly supported. This was harder than we thought and it took a good half of the day to make something that would hold it steady. In the end Ellen made up a cross support out of thin metal. This metal was taken from an old Californian number plate – very appropriate, we thought!

After putting the diagonal in place, we adjusted the mirror cell setting bolts so that it was all central and looked through the scope. Without an eye piece what we could see was an image of our own eye reflected back – it looks as if your eye is trapped, caged in the frame of the round mirror. By adjusting the three bolts at the back of the mirror we could make sure that this image of the eye was right in the middle. This way we could set up the scope.

We needed to make sure that the eye pieces could be held in the correct place and able to be adjusted back and forth to get the best focus. As we didn’t know exactly where the place of best focus would be so we had to play around with the scope looking at a lot of different things in the desert – good fun.