Tweet
So did anyone get anything fun for Christmas?
I did. I got an extended vixen bar for my C8 tube so now my diagonal and eyepieces don't GOTO the base of the mount anymore when I'm trying to look at Mars or the Pleiades during zenith as well as I can run my F/6.3 reducer full time now. What sucks is the bar throws my mount balance off so I currently have ~2.5lbs of steel plates and welding tabs taped together with masking tape that's then taped to the end of the bar to balance everything out. It looks trashy, but it works.
My next present, a Televue Powermate 5x (3.15x zoom with the reducer), gives me around 267x magnification when used with my 24mm Panoptic and reducer. That's a hair more magnification than an unreduced 8mm Plossl with 18 more degrees in the FOV. It's also brighter than the Plossl since it's faster (F/6.3 vs F/10). I can remove the reducer and go up to 423x magnification with the 5x and the 24mm, but there's a noticeable loss of brightness at those zoom and f-stop levels that greatly reduces the fun of visual viewing...and the wind gusts were so bad last night that the telescope would shake enough to mess with focus at the highest levels.
It's awesome being able to alternate between a mid-high zoom of 267x and lowest power widefiled zoom of 53x (with 1.25"). You'd think all that glass in between me and the targets would make for worse viewings but it was 10x more enjoyable than the closest I could get with my cheaper Meade Plossls regardless of the reducer or barlow setup.
If y'all can't tell, I'm really excited about all of that telescope stuff.
My other present was very, very fun...for about 45 seconds until it wasn't. It's an Asus Dual Radeon 6700 XT OC. MSFS 2020 was just awesome for a whopping 45 seconds, like no upscale actually real 4K60 fun using High-Ultra settings and Photogrammetry , until out of nowhere it became worse than the RX 580 it was replacing and the FPS graph started turning purple. After wondering WTF was going on I opened up Catalyst, realized that the fans on the GPU weren't spinning, looked at the temperature, and the GPU was running at 104C. After a bit of checking and thinking Windows was somehow to blame, I ran DDU and reinstalled my drivers a 2nd time, turned off ZeroRPM and set custom fan curves, the standard sfc /scannow, tried the P and Q mode GPU bios switch, and then I realized that the fans didn't spin on Linux or when GPUs do that initial spin when booting up and finally accepted that I got a bad GPU. Newegg already accepted the RMA so now I'm waiting on the UPS Store to open since they were closed yesterday (not complaining about them being closed; glad their workers got to do holiday things).
After experiencing real 4K60, fake 4K60 (1080p upscaled) is hard to go back to
I did. I got an extended vixen bar for my C8 tube so now my diagonal and eyepieces don't GOTO the base of the mount anymore when I'm trying to look at Mars or the Pleiades during zenith as well as I can run my F/6.3 reducer full time now. What sucks is the bar throws my mount balance off so I currently have ~2.5lbs of steel plates and welding tabs taped together with masking tape that's then taped to the end of the bar to balance everything out. It looks trashy, but it works.
My next present, a Televue Powermate 5x (3.15x zoom with the reducer), gives me around 267x magnification when used with my 24mm Panoptic and reducer. That's a hair more magnification than an unreduced 8mm Plossl with 18 more degrees in the FOV. It's also brighter than the Plossl since it's faster (F/6.3 vs F/10). I can remove the reducer and go up to 423x magnification with the 5x and the 24mm, but there's a noticeable loss of brightness at those zoom and f-stop levels that greatly reduces the fun of visual viewing...and the wind gusts were so bad last night that the telescope would shake enough to mess with focus at the highest levels.
It's awesome being able to alternate between a mid-high zoom of 267x and lowest power widefiled zoom of 53x (with 1.25"). You'd think all that glass in between me and the targets would make for worse viewings but it was 10x more enjoyable than the closest I could get with my cheaper Meade Plossls regardless of the reducer or barlow setup.
If y'all can't tell, I'm really excited about all of that telescope stuff.
My other present was very, very fun...for about 45 seconds until it wasn't. It's an Asus Dual Radeon 6700 XT OC. MSFS 2020 was just awesome for a whopping 45 seconds, like no upscale actually real 4K60 fun using High-Ultra settings and Photogrammetry , until out of nowhere it became worse than the RX 580 it was replacing and the FPS graph started turning purple. After wondering WTF was going on I opened up Catalyst, realized that the fans on the GPU weren't spinning, looked at the temperature, and the GPU was running at 104C. After a bit of checking and thinking Windows was somehow to blame, I ran DDU and reinstalled my drivers a 2nd time, turned off ZeroRPM and set custom fan curves, the standard sfc /scannow, tried the P and Q mode GPU bios switch, and then I realized that the fans didn't spin on Linux or when GPUs do that initial spin when booting up and finally accepted that I got a bad GPU. Newegg already accepted the RMA so now I'm waiting on the UPS Store to open since they were closed yesterday (not complaining about them being closed; glad their workers got to do holiday things).
After experiencing real 4K60, fake 4K60 (1080p upscaled) is hard to go back to