Hacking the SkyScanner 100: six easy pieces

Remember this thing? It’s a lovely little scope, but I got tired of crouching over it. And it’s made out of tractable materials – rolled steel and particle board, mostly – and costs next to nothing as these things go ($100 as of this writing), so it was basically crying out for customization. I made six fixes – two on the base, two on the outside of the tube, and two on the inside of the tube. They’re all cheap, fast, and easy, hence the title of the post (with apologies to Richard Feynman!).

My first two mods were to the base. (1) I had a leftover eyepiece rack, which I screwed to the base in the only place and at the only angle that it would fit. It works great. My very first scope, an Orion XT6, came with an eyepiece rack like this (which has since been dropped from the base model XT6), as did my XT10, and I’ve always found them to be very convenient. It took me a long time to realize that an eyepiece rack didn’t have to be horizontal to work, especially if the eyepieces are always capped so they can’t fall out.

(2) The second mod is the wire handle on the top of the base, which I scavenged from an earthquake stabilization kit for furniture. It’s just a small woven steel wire with an eyelet at either end which is screwed into the particle board that makes up the base. When I put it on, I thought I’d cut a piece of aquarium tube to slide over it as a cushion. I still might do that at some point, but so far I haven’t needed to. The whole scope and mount only weighs 6 lbs, maybe 7 with a full eyepiece rack, and I’m never carrying the scope that far. Basically from the garage to the driveway, or from the car to a picnic table. So the wire handle has not had the opportunity to get uncomfortable yet. This was the simplest mod but may be the one that has made the most difference in terms of overall convenience. Orion should just build ’em this way, even if it bumped up the price by five bucks.

The piece of tape on the tube is covering the holes intended for mounting the dot finder. I never used it, and now the holes are in an inconvenient place. I’ll come up with a more permanent and better-looking solution than the tape, but at least it keeps dust out of the tube for now.

This photo shows the two mods to the outside of the tube. (3) Originally the focuser pointed straight up, with the focus knobs on the opposite side of the base arm. I wanted the focuser to face up at a comfortable angle, so I wouldn’t have to lean so far over the scope while using it. And I wanted the knobs on the same side as the base arm, so the eyepiece rack would face the user. Achieving both of those goals meant moving the scope’s dovetail bar about 135 degrees around the tube. To do that, I had to drill new holes in the tube. I used a paper wrap to get the new holes lined up with the old ones and with each other, made pilot dents using a thumbtack, then drilled them out with a cordless electric drill. It’s not a good idea to have metal filings flying around precision optics, so I removed both mirrors before drilling the holes. It’s fun to take a telescope all the way apart and put it back together, especially if it works better after you’ve done so. Everyone should try it.

(4) Once I had the dovetail moved over to the new holes, I had a couple of perfectly good holes in the tube in a convenient place, and at a convenient angle from the dovetail and the focuser. So I built a laser trough to go there. It’s an idea I got from Ken Crowder, a former PVAA member. Back in 2010 on one of my first trips to the Salton Sea, Ken had his 8-inch SCT set up with a video camera for taking integrated shots of deep sky objects. To help get on target, he had wooden bracket pretty much like the one you see above, into which he would lay his laser pointer. Lots of companies make special rings for adapting handheld laser pointers into telescope finders. But like me, Ken wanted to be able to do other stuff with his laser at a moment’s notice, like trace out constellations for newcomers, or point out especially nice things in the sky without moving his telescope. The wooden bracket lets you drop in the laser and get on target quickly, and then lift it out and use it for other things.

To fine-tune the aim, Ken would shim his with little scraps of wood and paper, and I intend to do the same if necessary. But with the SkyScanner’s 400mm focal length, a 32mm Plossl yields 12.5x and 4-degree true field of view, and even a 25mm gives 16x and a 3-degree field, so even without shimming the laser is usually good enough.

Here’s a close-up of the laser trough. I built it out of wood scraps and glue. The hardware store didn’t have hex-cap metric screws in the size I needed so I got machine screws and washers. I used a spade bit to cut little indentations for the hardware. The two square stringers on the bottom are to help keep the whole rig aligned with the long axis of the tube.

Finally, the two inside-the-tube mods. (5) I center-spotted the primary to aid in collimation. The best thing to use for this is a notebook reinforcing ring. I have a whole package of those somewhere, but I can’t find it. But I did find a package of the little round stickers of the kind you use to make price tags at garage sales, and made it into a ring with a handheld hole punch. It works great. I have doubts about its longevity, but if and when it falls off, I’ll just make another. It seriously takes less than five minutes. Most mass-produced reflectors these days ship with their primary mirrors already center-spotted, and it really helps with collimation.

(6) As explained in the last post (link), I swapped the stock Allen bolts for secondary collimation with standard hex-cap bolts that I can turn by hand and lightly tighten with a small pair of pliers.

So how does the reborn SkyScanner work? Pretty darned well! It was already an extremely convenient and easy-to-use scope, and now it’s even moreso.

I’m not done hacking on it. As shipped, the primary mirror can’t be collimated. I read on CN about lengthening the bolt holes in the OTA that the mirror cell is screwed into, so that the mirror cell can be tilted to achieve primary collimation. I tried this and didn’t like the results. It’s very hard for me to get the mirror cell mounting bolts tightened down enough to keep the mirror cell from shifting. Especially because it’s natural to grab the back of the scope to help aim it, and in doing so I almost always shift the mirror cell relative to the OTA and subtly throw off collimation. Or not subtly – at f/4, every last arc-second of collimation matters. So I’m going to build a fully-collimatable mirror cell.

And I’m going to figure out a better way to cover those holes in the tube for the finder. And flock the inside of the tube, and make a long dewshield to keep stray light from hitting the secondary and the focuser drawtube. And probably do some other stuff I haven’t thought of yet. I’m basically going to treat this scope as a testbed for every hack I can think of. Should keep me busy for a while.