Delica Canada | Mitsubishi Van Club

I got back this afternoon from this year's Mount Kobau Star Party http://www.mksp.ca. For a variety of reasons I only spent one night, but it was worth it. The conditions were a bit rustic but the observing was what I went for.This is exactly the sort of trip I bought Gumdrop for, carrying cameras and telescopes and radios and things up mountains, and Gumdrop was clearly in her element. It took a couple of iterations to find a good sleeping position. While the seats do indeed fold down in to a bed, it's a bed clearly designed for people smaller than me. Next time I'll probably remove the rear seats and use an air mattress. More room for telescope gear anyway.

Mount Kobau is just west of Osoyoos. Light from Osoyoos and Oliver is starting to affect the skies there, but since the star party site is on the opposite side of the mountain to the towns, it's not as bad as it could be.Astronomy highlights included seeing the "Pillars of Creation" feature in the Eagle Nebula, and seeing the Orion Nebula just before dawn. In a big (18 inch) scope. That's an 18 inch Star Splitter. Star Splitter are long gone, but the scope is a near-clone of this one http://www.obsessiontelescopes.com/tele ... index.html. I could get a bigger scope in Gumdrop, but I can't get a bigger scope in my apartment...

Delica sightings: L300 in Keremeos, L400 in Princeton. Lots of JDM Landcruisers.

...laura

That sounds like it was amazing, next time something like that is going on, if you want a passenger or another vehicle for the road trip I'd be interested. My SWB Paj can't fit that much in it though, lol, at least compared to an L300.

Hi Laura,

I tried to answer my daughter's question but I can't.
How do you look through your telescope. And how can it fit in the van?
Seriously these are her questions.

-Isaac

deLOOKA wrote:Hi Laura,

I tried to answer my daughter's question but I can't.
How do you look through your telescope. And how can it fit in the van?
Seriously these are her questions.

-Isaac

The telescope is a Newtonian reflector. The big primary mirror, 18 inches across, is in the wooden housing at the bottom. It gathers light which then bounces off the secondary mirror in the "drum" housing at the top, sending it out the side to the eyepiece. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonian_telescope. When the scope is pointing high in the sky I can't reach the eyepiece, which is what the ladder (blown over by the wind) is for.

The beauty of this design is that the truss tubes between the rocker box and the secondary cage are removable. So when you take it apart for transport you have a big wooden box, the secondary cage which sits on top of it, and a pile of aluminum tubes. To make things even easier scopes in this size range have detachable wheeled handles, so you attach them and wheel it around like a wheelbarrow. That's what the things with wheels are under Gumdrop's rear bumper. It weighs nearly 150 kilos, but it's remarkably easy to move around. I made a set of loading ramps from 2x8s to get it in and out of Gumdrop.

Here is a web page from somebody who built a similar scope, with pictures of all the bits and pieces: http://www.astrosurf.com/jwisn/20inch.htm. The mount is called a Dobsonian mount, after John Dobson, who popularized it. You can't use it for astrophotography, but it's excellent for visual observation: the scope moves with one finger, stays where you point it, and any vibrations are damped quickly by all the wood. The bearings are teflon with formica tabletop sheet material - they don't have to move very fast, but they have to be very smooth. They are. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobsonian_telescope. It looks complicated, but it only takes 10 minutes to set up.

People used to make telescopes in this size range with solid tubes, often using Sonotube concrete forms. They worked well but were extremely unwieldy. One group actually used a converted school bus to haul their telescope around, and it was about the same size as mine.

...laura

Here's what the scope looks like knocked down, with the truss tubes, wheelbarrow handles and loading ramps....laura

Very nice. I guess on a mountain you had clear skies with no LP? Also can these scopes have tracking to take astro photographs?

I honestly thought by the name of this post it was an Anime convention or a Japanese Soap opera thing!
Thank you for taking the time do make up that post,very interesting and intriguing.
Ranks way up there with for neatest Delica use.
I will forgo all my Uranus jokes as you have no doubt heard them all.
Hopefully made up some of your own too!

Right on!

Here's a picture from the drive back down the mountain, with Gumdrop pretending to be all butch and rugged......laura