Hi list.
My telescope (12' LX200 ) has a mysterious behavior that makes me think to
disassemble the entire RA drive.
I discover this behavior after some failures in the astrophotography.
The failures happened just because without any reason suddenly the guiding
star disappeared from the reticle eyepiece with a short metallic noise
present
and of course any photograph was destroyed.
So the last night I setup the telescope on the wedge pointing to the Polaris

without any power and the RA knob released trying to figure out what is
happen.
I surprisingly discovered that when I rotate the telescope in RA handling
just
the forks there was an area around which a leaping is happen.
The leaping is happen every time the telescope pass the area moving
bi-directional.
In the point the leaping is happen I can see the Polaris drifting rapid
several
arc minutes away and also some times I can hear the short soft metallic
noise.
Note that the telescope rotates complete free around this area .
In the first test I thought that a mirror shift is happen but after a few
more test
I was sure all the entire fork system is leaping.
So now I am in the position to disassemble the mount removing the upper
metallic case and facing something that it seems it is the ball-bearing.
So now I need directions of how to proceed and disassemble the RA or better
some photographs from the RA disassembled that I remember
I saw once upon a time but I can' t find them again.
Thanks
George Nikolidakis
http://www.geocities.com/ginik_gr

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