 this video is sponsored by Squarespace. I'm naturally a very disorganized person. It's weird for me to say that because professionally I used to be a librarian so you'd think that someone that would go into a field like that, librarianship would be organized. And the thing is I desperately want to be organized. So I go through these cycles, basically I adopt a system for ordering all the things in my life or a subset of things in my life. And sometimes I can stay organized with those things for months or even years when the system is really working. But then all it takes is a little crack in that system for everything to fall apart. And I end up with something like this. I'm ashamed to admit that this is my collection of cables for astrophotography at the moment. Here's how this happened. If you go back a few years in my channel, you can find a series of videos on cable management. I was just getting back into making YouTube videos. So they're a little bit awkward, but I think still pretty good and relevant in terms of the information because it did work really well for me for quite a long time. The system I devised back then was a single telescope. It was my stellar view telescope in a custom padded box where all of the cabling and accessories and everything remained hooked up on top of the telescope. So all I had to do was just take out the whole thing, put it on a mount, connect a few cables, and I was imaging. And this was really great. At the time I was a mobile imager, meaning that I was always traveling by car to get out of Boston to do astrophotography. So it was designed around that idea to have my gear safe while driving and then to get it set up quickly when I arrived at the dark site. So the main thing that helped with that was of course, you know, a padded box that was custom that fit everything. But in addition to that, I used the original Pegasus power box for all the power distribution. So what happened? Well, the main thing was I started doing a lot more reviews on my YouTube channel here, and that means that new equipment will come in for a few months, I test it out, I do the review, and then the equipment leaves. But during those few months, I need to build up an astrophotography kit around whatever I'm reviewing, whether it's a telescope, a camera, a mount, or even an accessory sometimes. And when you have to build up a kit, you might start cannibalizing your existing kits. And that's what happened to me. So I had this perfect travel kit built around the Stellarview telescope. But then when a new piece of equipment came in, I would borrow a cable from here, put it over here, and then another new piece of equipment come in, I'd borrow that cable and put it somewhere else. And eventually the whole thing just became a mess. And I had no working systems, no working kits. So I'm ashamed of this because the truth is that this is an impediment to actually getting my work done. I really need a new strategy for cables where it makes sense. I'm not just going through a huge cable mess every time I have to put together a new rig. So here's what I've come up with. And I'm pretty optimistic that this should work better for me. Now I want to emphasize that better for me because, of course, your situation would probably be different than mine. But hopefully you can take some things from this that might be helpful. So it's a strategy with a few different parts. Part one is labeling. And you might think why label a cable? Shouldn't it be obvious just by looking at the ends of the cable? Well, that's what I thought. So that's why I've never labeled my cables. But then I started thinking about it. And when I am going through this cable mess and I need a certain USB cable, I realized it takes a long time to actually look at all those different connectors and be like, oh, well, this is A to standard B. And this is A to micro B and mini B and USB C. So labels do really speed things up because you just find the A connector. You read the label, you know what the other end is. The second thing I'm doing is I'm installing cable racks. And I saw these on one of my observatory tours. My friend, Christopher Baker, had them in his observatory. And I thought, wow, that is an excellent idea. So I'm still working on building my observatory. So at least for right now, these racks are just going up in the garage. But I have one rack for data cables, one rack for power cables. And of course, the cables are grouped by type and also length to some degree. And the third part to my strategy is Nick from Smart Components on Etsy. He's a store on Etsy. He sent me some of his 3D printed cable organizers that work with my ZWO and QHY astronomy cameras. And these cable organizers are great because they go right onto the back of the camera. And then it's very easy to route different cables and keep everything a lot more organized than just having the cables sort of fall off and go in any random direction. And the final thing in my strategy is I'm considering replacing my beloved pocket power box and Anker USB hub with this new Pegasus product, which is their saddle power box. Basically, this is like one of their newer advanced pocket power boxes where they added the USB hub. But now the whole power box is built into the saddle. So where you attach the telescope, the saddle can accept either Vixen or as law as Mandy dovetail plates, and it can be adapted to a variety of mounts. So I've been using this saddle power box on the Nix 101 because Pegasus sent the whole thing as a unit because I'm reviewing the Nix 101. But like I said, I've really considering buying one of these saddle boxes myself because I've just been really impressed by it. And there's various adapters that you can get. So you can attach it to different mounts, not just the Nix 101, but I could attach it to my EQ6R or my AM5 or maybe new mounts that come in for testing. So to explain why I like this saddle power box better than the pocket power box, especially for cable management, let's now go through an example of rigging up a telescope with my new strategy here for cable management. Okay, so to set the stage, let's say this is the afternoon before testing something new for the channel and the forecast is clear for tonight. So I have all my cables on the wall here and I have my saddle power box from Pegasus Astro installed on the mount that I'm using. In this case, the Pegasus Nix 101. And the first step is I attach the telescope and the camera to the mount. I then install the guide scope and guide camera. And in the case of this telescope setup, which is the Ascar FMA 180 Pro, where would I now put the pocket power box? It could just dangle off the side. I could spend time rigging something complex up using cheese plates and a longer dovetail. But this is why I like the saddle power box because all the connectivity I need is now right in the saddle. So it just makes it really easy. I just slide on my smart components cable organizers, then I go back to my cable racks on the wall, pull the cables I'll need for this kit and route them all in. In this case, I need a USB-C cable for the guide camera, a USB-B cable for the filter wheel, another USB-B cable for the mount, a USB-3 cable for the main camera, dew heater bands for both the telescope and the guide scope, a regular power cable for the camera, power cables for the saddle and the mount, and finally a USB-3 cable for the PC. So that is a lot of cables, but between the saddle power box and the cable organizers from Smart Components and a couple Velcro ties, it's all quite tidy as you can see here. So my plan from here would be to keep this rig set up like this as long as I'm testing whatever it is I'm testing. And then when the review is over, all the cables would go back in their spots on the wall. So you may have noticed looking at my cable rack that I have a lot of cables for astrophotography. I like to have plenty of backups, but I'm probably overstocked on some cables and understocked on others. So after I finish the observatory and settle a bit more with what I'm doing, I'm going to do a cable audit and make sure that I have what I need for the permanent rigs, the testing rigs, and at least one backup for everything. I really think that's another one of my good ideas is to have at least one backup cable for every kind of cable that you use normally. As astrophotographers, we put our cables through a lot more abuse than you would just through general computing. So they have shorter life spans, at least that's what I've noticed. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. I use Squarespace for my personal portfolio of photography at Nikocarver.com because Squarespace makes it super easy with their website builder and their flexible but professional templates. There is a template for every kind of website you'd want to design and then of course you can customize your website on both the design and of course the content, however you wish, quite easily with their drag and drop engine. And of course, since it's 2023, these designs look great on mobile devices as well as your laptop or desktops. And that's done through responsive design. 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