The Skywatcher 80ED arrived on Friday along with the dual-mount bar for mounting two telescopes side-by-side on a telescope mount. As far as I know this scope is only available in Europe but is rebadged as the Orion SkyView Pro ED80 EQ Apo Refractor Telescope in the USA.

The 80ED arrived in a nice aluminium carry case with the extras: a 2-inch diagonal, 2-inch 28mm lens, a 2-inch to 1.25 inch adapter, telescope rings and dovetail plate and a finder scope. Here’s a picture with the dual-mount bar in front of the carry case:

I also bought some tube rings and dovetail plate for the 80mm refractor I currently have that I’ll be using as a guidescope.

Putting It All Together

The first thing to do was assemble the dual-mount bar. It comes as two shoes and a bar that have to be screwed together.

I removed the Vixen VC200L 8-inch scope from the EQ6 mount, detached the 80mm refractor that was bolted to it and inserted the refractor into the tube rings. Next, I placed the dual mount bar into the recess on the EQ6. The bar is not as wide as the dovetail plate on the Vixen, having several millimetres clearance, but the mount’s locking screws fastened it securely in place.

The 80mm guidescope was now mounted onto the right-hand shoe of the dual-mount plate and the 80ED onto the left shoe. Since the 80ED is a much heavier scope than the guidescope, I had to make some adjustments to the positioning of the shoes on the dual-mount bar, and the position of the bar itself on the mount. I ended up having to move the 80ED shoe towards the center of the bar by a couple of positions. The guidescope shoe was fixed at the right-most position on the bar. I then had to position the bar so that the 80ED was just left of the center of the EQ6 and the guidescope further off to the right.

This was done wiitha camera attached to the 80ED so that the balance would be good when all equipment is in use.

With the two scopes fairly well balanced, I had to adjust the counterweight positions as the ED80 is a lighter telescope than the Vixen 8-inch.

With everything sorted,barring first light for the scope and a test astrophotography run, the heavens opened and there was a torrential downpour.

Waterlogged Observatory

That’s when I found out that the observatory was leaking like a sieve. Since I haven’t been using it for the last several months, I didn’t realise it was letting in water. A hasty dash to get a plastic sheet to cover the telescopes and EQ6 saw them protected from the incessant drips and some pots from the kitchen were pressed into use to capture the runoff from the plastic sheet.

I knew there was a job coming up for the weekend…laying new roofing felt on the observatory roof. All I could hope was that Saturday would be reasonably dry to allow me to do just that…

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