The Antelope Valley Observatory

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AINA 20 Inch Telescope Project

The Antelope Valley Observatory is working with our friends at the Astronomical Institute of North America (AINA) on refurbishing their 20 inch Newtonian telescope and it's German Equatorial mount. The scope when finished will be housed in a new observatory structure here at the Antelope Valley Observatory.

When the AINA 20 inch telescope is finished its main purpose will be public outreach and education. AINA will be training members in its operation and hope to involve many of the local Southern California Astronomy clubs in its outreach activities.

AINA is a non profit 501 C 3 organization. For more information go to www.AstronomicalInstitute.org.

Here is Steve contemplating what we'll do next as we inspect and begin the refurbishment project on the AINA 20 inch telescope. The mirror and mirror cell has been removed as we discovered that there was virtually nothing holding the mirror in the cell. We will be sending the mirror in to have it refinished and the scope and mount will be completely disassembled cleaned, inspected, repaired, painted and lubed as necessary. This will be a long and tedious project but the end result should be nothing short of amazing.

Here you can see what was holding the mirror. The small plate in the center with the 1/4 inch stud. When you remove the mirror cover there is nothing holding the mirror as the nut on the stud is removed to take off the cover. The center plate in the right photo (inset in mirror) was added after the original mirror was replaced and never drilled for the three hole pattern that you see in the left photo. The original block under the center plate in the right photo is drilled and tapped to match the pattern of the left center plate. We will be drilling the right plate to match the others so that we can attach the mirror with the three hole pattern.

Here are the electronics that go with the mount. We decided that since we were there we should check out the electronics. It's a good thing we did. After plugging in the power supply and verifying the voltage we hooked everything up. After reapplying the power we discovered the the RA motor would not work. We swapped motor wires to verify that we had power to the Ra wiring; which we did, then we the did the "Wiggle Test" and ended up with a handful of loose wires from the RA motor.

Here are Steve and Bill repairing the broken wires on the RA motor. Notice the smile on Steve's face, he's glad that Bill is soldering all those itsy bitsy wires! After the second try, there were more loose wires, we were successful! Everything works.

We decided that we will have one night viewing with the scope before tearing it down so that we may find any other hidden problems.

	Here is the upper cage assembly after we installed the secondary for the second time. We installed the secondary and then noticed that the focuser was not even close to being in the proper position. We removed the secondary; reconfigured the focuser mount, then laser aligned the the focuser angles so that everything lined up nicely, or so we thought!
	After assembling the scope the balance was still way off. We did not include a finder on the secondary cage as it was before causing the balance problem. No problem, a five pound barbell weight and a C clamp and all was good.
	Here is Tom going "Yeah, this is gonna be FUN". The next step is to move it out, polar align and enjoy the view.
	Here it is, roughly polar aligned and ready to go.Yes that is a six foot ladder!

Conclusion: After assembling the scope, polar aligning and collimating we took our first view. Unfortunately we were disappointed in the first images. We then used a ronchi grating to test the mirror and found NO major defects. We did find a slightly turned edge but that could be due to the damage to the coatings that the mirror sustained during shipment from Canada. The alignment for the primary mirror is of some concern as it is set up as a four point system. We will try to spring load each of the points in the hope that we can eliminate any distortion to the mirror cell during collimation. This will be a great scope once we work out the bugs and get everything aligned.

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