User friendly mods

11/04/07

At the 2007 Winter Star Party (http://www.jimrichberg.com/astronomy/winter_star_party%202007.htm) my old observing buddy Tony Costanza, who now has his own specialty astronomy store (http://www.astronomy-shoppe.com/) gave me some thumbnail-sized samples of a an adhesive-backed luminescent material he calls "Astro-Glow". I found it extremely bright for its size, producing a phosphorescent green glow lasting all night long after a few minutes exposure to white light or sunlight. Since I will be using Brutus (http://www.jimrichberg.com/astronomy/Brutus%20main%20page.htm) for a large number of public outreach events this year, I used the half-dozen discs Tony gave me to provide 'user friendly' markings on:

the treads of my observing ladders

I initially put small (~10mm x 3mm) snippets on the upper three rungs of my Little Giant observing ladder as a proof of concept. When this produced spontaneous comments from members of the viewing public about how much they appreciated knowing where each step was, I decided to add this to *all* of my ladders!

Astro-Glow taped to center of ladder treads

the knobs on Brutus' secondary cage used to manually move the scope. I actually envision this being more useful to other astronomers viewing through my scope, since they don't know to look for the furniture knobs to use for fine tracking, and grab instead at the upper ring (as on an unmodified Dob). The original application of full diameter (~3/4") circles produced TOO MUCH light, and I have backed these down to fragments of ~3-4mm diameter instead.

Cut-down piece of Astro-Glow on end of knob

the fine focuser knob Similarly, for other astronomers I have affixed a thin strip of Astro-Glow to the end of the fine focuser knob. This will be especially helpful since the focuser is mounted at an unorthodox 45 degree angle that users won't expect.

Strip of Astro-Glow on end of fine focus knob

the handles of Brutus I already had reflective tape mounted on the rear of the handles to help folks avoid tripping over them in the dark. One circle of Astro-Glow on each handle basically makes the tape moot!

Whole disc of Astro-Glow on Dob handles, along with reflective tape
(you can see the handles on the ramps I use to load the scope with below the handles in this shot)

The rim of my Public Viewing eyepieces. How many times have you had people try to look through the finder or (when I had my Clement) the focuser, instead of the eyepiece? Shining a red light onto the eyepiece works, but isn't exactly elegant or conducive to preserving night vision. I therefore took tiny fragments of the Astro-Glow and scotch-taped them to the top edge of the eyepiece cup on the two eyepieces I plan to use for public events-- the Widescan III clone and the 13mm Russell.

Here is a shot of the Astro-Glow on the two eyepieces -- I can tell the public to look in between the two glowing spots on each eyepiece

In light of my outreach, I even decided to get creative and use snippets of these circles to make a nametag I can wear at outreach events.

Bottom line: two thumbs up for this product, and my thanks to Tony for making it available to me. It has lots of potential applications that can make using a telescope safer and more user friendly. You can really get creative with this stuff!

$Refractors$

This site was last updated 05/07/07