Park telescope checkout

I spent about 4 hours today checking out three of the Park's telescopes: Celestron 5", Orion 3", and Meade 4". The Celestron continues to look good. The optics are in pretty good collimation. The targets were all in alignment although it could be a bit better. The tripod is a little bit wobbly but otherwise seems serviceable. It is missing a locking bold on one leg. This tripod is similar to the one's on the Orions and one of those bolds may work temporarily. I plugged the drive into my 12v portable power station (Chicago Electric from Harbor Freight, $90) and everything fired up. Movement is smooth and handbox buttons all work fine. I tried pointing at a distant tree and verified that the 'save land object' and 'goto land object' functions work. If the scope is in the near vertical position there is some interference between the OTA and the tripod. This may be normal but needs to be checked out and if normal, watch out for it. There doesn't appear to be any protection and the gears might be stripped. The view through either 25mm or 10mm eyepieces seems good and I could tell no difference between the available ep's and my Plöessls. Some of the eyepieces are marked KE and others are Orion Explorer II. They all look similar. Tristan Schwartz at Cloudy Nights gives them high marks. They are basically either Kellners (25mm) or Plöessls (10mm). The Celestron's red dot finder needs a 3v battery.

The Orion 3" Spaceprobe needed a bit of tightening and it is now steady as a rock. The tripod seems sturdy enough although I did not extend the legs. The optics were in perfect collimation. The red dot finder also needs a battery. There are three more boxes in the storage room that may also be Orion 3" scopes. These also need to be taken down and checked for missing/damaged parts.

The Meade 4" tripod is pretty much unusable when the legs are fully extended. They flex quite a bit. The azimuth bearing is very wobbly and the altitude bearing a bit so. The most serious problem is that there are no eyepieces. The focuser is a 2" barrel but it was fitted with a .965" adapter. There is a 2" bushing but no threaded ring to hold it on. It needs a 1.25" adapter before the existing eyepieces can be used. I was able to install the second motor. The power supply is 12v but my bayonet connector would not fit so I was not able to check out the drive operation. The Autostar handbox appears to be unused as the protective cover on the screen was still in place!

Here are the magnification firgures for the three scopes. The 3" is a 700mm FL, the 4" is 910, and the 5" is 650mm. Magnification available for the 3" is: 700/25 = 28x, and 700/10=70x. With a 2x shorty barlow this gives magnifications of: 28x, 56x, 70x, and 140x.
Magnification for the 5" is:
650/25 = 26x, and 650/10 = 65x. With a 2x barlow, that gives 26x, 52x, 65x, and 130x.
If the 4" is ever usable, it's 910mm focal length will result in magnifications of: 910/25 = 36.4x, 9210/10 = 91x or 36.4x, 72.8x, 91x, and 182x.
The next step is to try star testing the optics. It'll be interesting to see what sort of detail can be seen on Jupiter and how well the two scopes can split close doubles.