Pozdrav iz USA

[novalab]

Hello fellow Astronomers!

I apologize, but my language skills are not the best, so I will write in English and provide Google translation below.

Needless to say, I am a new member, and my name is Christopher Krstanovic. I was born in Belgrade longer ago than I care to say, but have lived here in USA all my life.

I'm a Physicist and Electrical Engineer by profession, but my passion has always been astronomy. I own several businesses here in the US, and NovaLab Observatory company is my latest venture. My thinking was why not marry something you love with the  business acumen.

I have recently moved from Boston, where I lived all my life, down here to much warmer (and snow-less) North Carolina, so I have not had a chance to complete my observatory. It is a big project, and my time is short. I hope to have it all done by the time the winter arrives.

I am one of those people who (almost) do not own any eyepieces. All I do is astrophotography, and my specific interest are the very distant galaxy clusters, Carbon Stars, as well as Exo-planet and SN photometric observations. My main instrument is Planewave 24" RC, with SBIG AC4040 back side illuminated camera, but I also do use C11 scopes when I need wider FOW. The onstep concerted LX200 classic is specifically used for automated supernova search.
 
I am looking forward to sharing with you all in  this forum.

Again, pleasure meeting you all (or y'all as they say here in the south).

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Pozdrav kolege astronomi!

Ispričavam se, ali moj jezik nije najbolji, pa ću pisati na engleskom i dati Google prijevod ispod.

Nepotrebno je reći da sam novi član i zovem se Christopher Krstanović. Rođen sam u Beogradu mnogo ranije nego što želim reći, ali sam cijeli život živio ovdje u SAD-u.

Po struci sam fizičar i inženjer elektrotehnike, ali moja je strast uvijek bila astronomija. Vlasnik sam nekoliko tvrtki ovdje u SAD-u, a tvrtka NovaLab Observatory moj je posljednji pothvat. Moje razmišljanje je bilo zašto se ne oženiti nečim što volite s poslovnom oštroumnošću.

Nedavno sam se preselio iz Bostona, gdje sam živio cijeli život, ovamo u mnogo topliju (i bez snijega) Sjevernu Karolinu, tako da nisam imao priliku dovršiti svoj opservatorij. To je veliki projekt, a moje vrijeme je malo. Nadam se da ću sve završiti do zime.

Ja sam jedan od onih koji (skoro) nemaju okulare. Sve što radim je astrofotografija, a moj poseban interes su vrlo daleki klasteri galaksija, Ugljične zvijezde, kao i fotometrijska promatranja Exo-planeta i SN. Moj glavni instrument je Plannewave 24" RC, sa SBIG AC4040 kamerom sa stražnjim osvjetljenjem, ali također koristim nišane C11 kada trebam šire FOW. Onstep usklađeni LX200 classic posebno se koristi za automatizirano pretraživanje supernova.
 
Radujem se što mogu podijeliti sa svima vama na ovom forumu.

Opet, drago mi je upoznati vas sve.

[Astro Lux]

Greetings, welcome to the forum. You have an amazing set of equipment I see.
I think everyone will gladly enjoy your images. 
  

[Štefek]

Hi Chris. Welcome to our small community . Looking forward to see your images and posts here. I am sure that English is not a problem for most of us.

[stipe]

It is a great pleasure to get here somebody from USA, which is the country with a lot of opportunities and possibilities in amateur astronomy! Very glad to meet you here on our astro forum!

Hope to exchange a lot of precious experience!

[Lucius]

Dobrodošao!

[Mount Pleasant Observatory (Bojan)]

Welcome! 

[Danijel]

Dobrodošao Christopher!

[tome]

Dobrodošao!   

[TonY206]

Welcome! 

[Astrobobo]

Hi Chris! Let us see the photos 

[novalab]

Thank you all for a warm welcome. I look forward to exchanging ideas and procedures here, and making good friends in the process. I am glad that most of you are fluent in English. I can read/understand Serbian & Croatian easily, but it is not that easy in the other direction. Especially with technical terms, which I never learned as a child. I hope to improve as time goes on.

As I mentioned, we recently moved from New England to be closer to our son, so my observatory is still nonexistent. It needs to be re-built, and I am currently just starting to get the quotes from various builders. All my equipment, and there is lots of it so it will take time, is in a climate controlled storage. This includes the astro file server, where I keep all the images collected over past 20 odd years, and I have nothing on my business server – sorry guys, but I will post a bunch when I get it out later this summer. The biggest problem now is deciding where to put the new building, as my wife has voiced some objections to my preferred location  , and there are lots of very tall trees on our land. I will give it my full attention to it when I return from a long business trip to Asia (where you can locally buy optics for a song). I need to retire...

I am very lucky to have my equipment, even by US standards. My observatory normally has 3 telescopes in use. The big 24" scope is under the 10 foot dome, and is a beast – takes 3 people to safely lift the OTA. , The 2 smaller C11s ones will be under a roll off roof. Each mount has a small USB to Ethernet server (I use VirtualHere), providing device (mount, cameras, focusers...) connections to the remote computers. So, I can run Maxim DL on any PC and control the entire system, and all the devices still appear as USB connections. To centralize the system all images from all mounts are stored on the NAS file server. This means I can observe even on my notebook, while watching movies with my family – which keeps peace with my wife. The only limitation so far is that my QHY guider cameras do not like to be controlled thru Wi-Fi on notebooks (some driver latency problem). This forces me to use a separate computer on Ethernet, and connect to it with the notebook using a remote desktop. This works.

My 24" RC is a great scope, but its native focal length of 6500mm makes FOV very narrow with cameras I can justify buying. And since the seeing in my area is usually around 2", that means that I get lots of very fat, bloated (ugly?) stars. However, in 1 hour it can reach >23.5 magnitude stars, and ~22.5 mag very distant small galaxies. A 10 hour exposure pushes this another magnitude deeper. My sky is 19.5MPAS, so nothing to write home about. It can do photometry of up to 17 mag with <0.010 accuracy in under 1 minute to observe Exo planet transits. I find that CMOS cameras do not have the greatest linearity, so when doing photometry I switch to my old STF-8300 CCD. Not quite QE of AC4040-BSI, but it works better. So, this scope is not used to make pretty pictures, but to get data for my research. Anyone wishing they had it should reconsider, unless they live on top of the mountain in Hawaii with 0.5" seeing. But it does produce some very interesting pictures of things that are very hard to capture otherwise. The scope needed no modifications at all, and Planewave people know their stuff – and how to charge for it     .

Truth be said, my favorite AP scopes are C11s. They provide a good compromise of cost, aperture and ELF. I do use Starizona 0.73x focal reducers. I found them to be the only ones that actually work reasonably well, even on an older C11 StarBright OTAs (my old baby) – which I love since I feel comfortable to hack and modify. I had the mirrors recoated to Enhanced Silver. Locking the primary mirror down and using the external focuser is imperative. Focuser is critical: no image shift during refocusing, no position slip and added temperature control. I found a pic of my old C11-SB setup (see below) – it still looks the same except that the guider has a motorized focuser, and it will lose its 8 foot dome since I left that in New England. Another thing missing are torsional preloads on RA and DEC axis. They ensure that the OTA is always East balanced, no matter what – on both axis. I also changed the OTA to Carbon Fiber, and installed temperature sensors on the inside of the OTA, underneath the flocking, along with mirror fans in the back. There is a thin nylon foil barrier isolating the front OTA air from the rear.  The front contains 500g of desiccant to keep it dry, so that the silver mirror coatings do not deteriorate. You can see where the temperature connection comes out on the side. You cannot see the desiccant port, or the RH meter on the other side. The focuser is a motorized Clement (https://www.clementfocuser.com/). Great device, but their website sucks. I use 2 filter wheels in tandem to accommodate all the filters I needed. Maxim has a provision for this configuration.

As you can tell, I am not so much into getting pretty pictures, but getting data for research. That said, I do enjoy nice images, and I found quite a few here. 

[arrow]

Welcome! 

[Acheron]

Welcome Chris 

[Teofil]

Welcome Christopher! 

[MrWorf]

Welcome chris!