Hi Jeff!

First off, I find the "scotch tape" method Meade recommends to be useless.
Others may have had success with it, but I did not. A better approach is to
find an eyepiece with a similar edge-of-barrel-to-glass distance as the
nosepiece-to-chip distance for your 216 (assuming you are using the
nosepiece in a 1.25" visual back). It's gotta be pretty close.

The noise you describe sounds about right; this would suggest that the
scope wasn't precisely aimed at anything - or at least, not precisely
enough for the image to fall on the chip. The 216's chip is very small, and
hard to get something right on without a flip mirror (or some such device)
to help.

The "half-white half-black" phenomenon you describe is something I have
personally seen. You didn't mention what it was you were trying to image; I
got this "symptom" when I had a very out of focus, off-center Saturn in my
FOV. Tweaking the focus helped, and as it came into focus the wide white
swath became more narrow and eventually disappeared revealing just a blurry
Saturn (until I finished the focusing). Incidentally, you should always
focus on a star, and preferably a bright one for a beginner. Just make sure
to keep your exposure times short enough to not overexpose it.

Chances are, *subtle* focusing is not what you need - you need a lot of
focal movement. Like I said, my experience with the "scotch tape" a few
years back was really a fiasco. The scope was nowhere near focus - some
10-15 turns of the knob off. Don't be afraid to spin in a while in one
direction or the other. Since this will induce image shift, you'll have to
be careful to recenter your object (which for a while may mean recentering
a donut or a white swath...)

Good luck - you'll get there, and believe me, it does get easier...

Mike F
http://fullerastropix.web.com


At 11:49 PM 10/2/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>I took advantage of a clear night and the full harvest moon to try out my
>216XT for the first time.
>
>I followed the CCD tutorial as described in the manual, using the "scotch
>tape" method to achieve focus before attaching the CCD.
>
>All the images were nothing but noise. Mostly like 50 vertical white lines
>about a pixel or two across. Sometimes nothing but black, but pressing the
>left/right arrow keys a couple of times would display solid white on the
>right 1/2, and solid black on the left 1/2 of the image. Nothing even close
>to an image.
>
>I tried subtle focusing in and out many times, but the images were always
>pretty much the same noise.
>
>I had essentially the same results using MaximDL and PictorView.
>
>Any ideas? Just symptoms of poor focusing perhaps?
>
>Jeff

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