[Chaos-l] dew prevention advice

[Breivogel, Christopher]

I was looking into buying or building a dew removal system for my LDX55 SN-10 a while back, but in the end I bought a 12V hair dryer and a battery from Wal-mart that's designed to be used to jump start your car.  I think the whole set up was about $40.  I was dreading the idea of all the figuring out how to make it work it I built one and the expense and all the wires going everywhere with one of the "normal" systems.  The hair dryer works really well; I can blow off all the dew on my corrector plate and eyepieces in a few minutes and it lasts a while unless it's really humid (and then your kind of screwed for observing anyway).

It might not work so well for a regular Newt, where the mirror would be hard to reach, but that's my $0.02.

Chris


-----Original Message-----
From: chaos-l-bounces at rtpnet.org on behalf of Michael Hrivnak
Sent: Mon 11/3/2008 6:24 PM
To: chaos
Subject: [Chaos-l] dew prevention advice
 
It's time for me to buy some dew prevention for my Starmaster 18.

First off, I am strongly considering building my own heating elements by 
following these instructions:

http://www.dewbuster.com/heaters/heaters.html

Rather than lay out $120-150 on heating elements, I think I can do it all for 
under $20.  Have any of you done this before?  Would anyone be interested in 
making some with me?  The resistors are real stinking cheap ($0.016), and 
shipping is really the greater cost (at about $5 for as many as you can buy).

As for a controller unit, what do you suggest?  Lots of people praise the 
DewBuster for its intelligent thermostat, but I'll mostly not be using that 
feature.  On the Starmaster, I'll just use it to heat the finder, telrad, 
eyepiece, and secondary mirror (which already has an AstroSystems heater that 
includes a thermostat).  However, I may want to use it on my refractor down 
the road, in which case the thermostat ability would come in handy.  Any 
opinions or experience to share?

Thanks,
Michael


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