 Today I'm going to be rigging this William Optics Redcat 51 telescope with all of these parts turning it from all of this into this. Fully ready, imaging setup, ready to put it on an equatorial mount and get started taking pictures like this one. So this is going to be just sort of a relaxed video. I'm going to be talking through each part that I have out here, what it does, why I have different connecting parts and weird little counterweights from small rig. Thank you to Small Rig for sending these to me. Oh, and I should start out by saying thank you very much to W.O. Boys with a Z. That's the U.S. store handling William Optics telescopes for sending me this Redcat 51 for this video and for some future videos too. And so anyways, like I said in the intro there, this is all the stuff that I'm going to be putting together. But as I go, I'll be talking through what I'm doing. So let's start with the Redcat 51. The first step when you get this telescope is this right here is the dew shield, but it's put on backwards for storage. So the first thing we're going to do is unscrew it like that and put it on the right way. There we go. So now that's all set up. I'll just talk through the telescope a little bit here for anyone not familiar with it. This is the focuser. So it's a helical focuser like a zoom lens. This up here is the lock for the focuser. So you unlock that and then you can focus the telescope here. And then when you're when you found focus, you just lock it back up and then it won't move. So pretty nice. I'm not going to get into all the intricacies of a helical focuser versus a normal telescope focuser here, but they did put in some really nice little ideas here like a fine gauge for infinity focus. So it's repeatable and things like that. Then back here we have the main ring for holding the telescope onto a dovetail plate. That's the dovetail plate that's included. I'll talk about that in a second. This knob right here is for releasing the manual rotator, which is very nice and it has a nice indicator ring for repeating, you know, rotational changes. Then when you found the rotation that you want, you just lock that back up with that little thumb screw right there and then it won't move. And then on the very back here we have just a metal cap. If I take that off, it exposes 48 millimeter threads, which are perfect for attaching an astro camera or a DSLR mirrorless camera if you have the T adapter. And this whole piece, which has the 48 millimeter threads comes off as well if you unscrew it. And then there's inner threads in here for putting in a two inch filter if you want to. So that's how that works. That's where you put in a two inch filter. You just install it and then screw the whole thing back on here. Okay, so that's it. Pretty simple, nice little telescope. Oh, I didn't mention it's 250 millimeter focal length at an F ratio of F 4.9. It is a quad, meaning there's four glass elements in here. That means that it's fully corrected. It's an astrograph basically and you don't need a fladdener element like a field fladdener on the back there because the corrector is already built in. Okay, the first thing that I would do with this telescope and many telescopes that I purchase is change out the dovetail plate. And you might be wondering why what's wrong with this dovetail plate. For my purposes, it's not long enough and this is going to get into my rigging philosophy. But I like to rig sort of down here at the dovetail level. So in the front and the back and the sides, many people will rig on top of the telescope. In which case you might not have to move that or replace the dovetail. But I don't like rigging on top because it just adds so much weight to the top which makes the balance more difficult, especially if you're using it on a small mount. So I usually rig off to the sides and in the front and we'll sort of get into that as we go here in the video. Anyways, this is a replacement dovetail that I think is a better length for my purposes for this telescope. This is the Ascar VDP 300. So it means that it's a 300 millimeter long dovetail. Well, it looks like the one that came with the Redcat is a little bit over 200 millimeters maybe. But you can see that it's a nice lightweight dovetail that's mostly hollowed out here on the bottom. And I actually like this style a lot because I can use all kinds of different screws in here and there's a lot of different mounting options with these sideways channels and the lengthwise channels. So I actually prefer this dovetail in some ways to this one. It also comes with a little option to put on the safety screws. I've taken those off in this case but you can add them back later if you want. Okay, so first step is we're going to replace this dovetail with this dovetail. To do that, we just are going to use our handy set of hex keys here. Take one out that I think works. Yep, that's it. And I'm just going to loosen up these guys just like that. Once they're loose, I can switch to that side and that makes it easy just to take those out. Okay, there we go. Pop those out. I'm going to keep this William Optics dovetail. I always keep everything that comes with any telescope in case I ever want to put it back on or use it for something else. One nice thing about the William Optics dovetail that the Asgar one doesn't do is it has this ridge right here so you can actually reverse this dovetail and this ridge allows you to mount it into a Arca Swiss clamp. Well, the bottom ridge is for a Vixen style clamp. This one is just a Vixen style. It doesn't have that Arca Swiss compatibility. Okay, with that done, I'm going to add this dovetail to here. I've already sort of planned this out, but if you're new to all this kind of rigging stuff, you can just play around with different configurations until you figure out what makes sense for you. Generally though, I like having plenty of room up here in the front for balance, and then it also gives me plenty of space to put in something like this, which we'll talk about, which is a cheese plate to add other things. Okay, so I'm going to put it in right here and I'll just use the same screws that it came with, or I should say bolts. For anyone that doesn't know, a screw really means that it should have a sharp end here. This is actually a bolt, but people will say screws too. Just technically it's a bolt. So I'm just going to start those with my fingers before switching to the hex key. Okay, once that's pretty much on there, I'm just going to make sure that it's straight from front to back before giving it a final tighten. Okay, good. So now we've put on the new Vixen dovetail, replacing this one that it came with, and you can see it's quite a bit longer. Done. First step done. Okay, the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add on my camera system here, and I'm not going to talk through all the intricacies of this, but what this is is it's a ZWO mono camera. The way that you know that it's a mono camera is it's ASI 1600mm cool. So if it was a color camera, it would be MC. That's just the way ZWO does it. You can see on the back there, it's a cooled camera, so it needs DC 12 volt power, and it has the USB 3 in and the USB 2 out ports there. And this is the fan that powers the thermoelectric cooler, which is what gives it most of its depth here. The sensor is up here in the front, right near the front. And then the way that I always recommend attaching the filter wheel to these ZWO cameras is attach it right to the camera. Don't put any spacers in between, because that will just probably cause vignetting. And then you have your spacers out here off the front of the filter wheel. Now, one thing that I discovered when I was using this earlier, just doing a little testing, is that with this amount of spacers out here in front of the filter wheel, I was right at the very, this side of the infinity symbol, just almost bottoming out by being so far in with the focus, like this. I was over here. And so this is optional, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to add another spacer here so that I'm more like there with the infinity focus. So I have a little bit more play just in case I need it. I'm mostly just doing this because I want to show something about adding spacers. It's not really necessary, because I think I have about 55 millimeter there, but I'm going to add a little bit more. In terms of back focus, this telescope doesn't have any particular strict back focus with a quad like this or an astrograph. As long as you reach focus, you're good. If it had a field flattener, then it usually has a strict 55 millimeter back focus, and you'd have to be more careful with the spacers. Anyways, so I want to add this spacer to my optical train here. It's just a 48 millimeter spacer. It doesn't change the width. So it's 48 millimeter male right here to 48 millimeter female here, and that's going to attach to the back of the red cat. Okay. Anyways, long preamble to say, I just want to show something new that someone told me on in a YouTube comments section, which is one issue I've had many times is you attach a spacer like that, and then with little spacers, it's hard to get them back apart like this. So one way to prevent them getting binded by the threads binding or galling up is to use this anti-seize lubricant on the threads before you attach the spacers together. Now you do have to be careful with this stuff because you don't want it like leaking out and down onto your filters or your sensor. So I just want to show this. I'm just going to take a tiny bit of this stuff onto this Q-tip here and just carefully spread it on the threads there. And then I'll just take a little bit of it off with the clean side of the Q-tip. And then just make sure I'm not leaving any little threads in there, which I'm not. And then I'll install that. All right, the next thing I want to add here is my Pegasus Astro Pocket Power Box. This gives me two dew heaters and four 12-volt power leads. And I can run this off AC or my battery, works really well. It also has a little environmental sensor for changing the intensity of the dew control and a DSLR out-power thing as well. Now, I've already used this in many different configurations, so I've sort of covered it with this 3M dual lock, which is like waterproof Velcro. And then this is my standard USB3 powered hub, which I usually just have Velcroed right on top and snaps into place right on top of my power box like that. Now, in terms of where to put this, you know, I could put it on top, but it doesn't really fit, that interferes with the focuser. And it doesn't fit in here, you can see, because we don't have the riser blocks. I could put it behind, but then I would have to have a really long dovetail. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this little guy here. This is called a cheese plate, and this one is made by SmallRig, who sent it to me. And what I'm going to do with the cheese plate is I'm going to put it in sideways like this so that I can attach the USB hub and the pocket power box to the side of the telescope like that. Now, because this is putting some weight onto one side, I'm going to balance it out with one of these SmallRig counterweights, which conveniently screw onto the cheese plate either on the side like that. So I'm going to use it, or if needed, they can screw right onto the top like so. Okay, and I'm going to measure, I mean weigh these things so I can know which counterweights to use. So I just have my kitchen scale here. I'll zero that out. It's in grams, so we can just make sure this is actually 200 grams. It's a little bit over according to this. There we go, 200, just like it said, 200 grams. And then we'll measure this one, and that's 232. That's probably close enough. They're going to be a little bit off-centered. They're not going to be perfectly centered across. But basically what I'm doing is I'm going to put this on this side, this on this side, and then screw it all on to the dovetail. Normally what I'd do is I'd put matching Velcro things right here on the dovetail to snap that on. Today, since I'm not sure if I'm going to keep this set up exactly as is, I'm just going to zip tie this on to here, because it has plenty of holes to use for zip tying it on, and that'll be easy. So I'm going to stop talking here for a moment and just put this all together. To make it easy, and because I know I want this to go sort of right here in the middle, I'm going to go ahead and remove the telescope from the ring. Wrong screw right here, this one, like that. Just to make it a little bit easier to put on the cheese plate, and then I'll put the telescope back on. So here we go. Let me get it all set up here. Okay, so as you can see, I just used two little one-quarter inch hex bolts. These also came from SmallRig. They have just a variety pack of those, and attached the cheese plate like that right onto the middle of the dovetail using those two hex bolts underneath there, right into the cheese plate like this. Okay, and then the next thing is I want to put that right there and put the counterweight here on this side. So let me just go ahead and put the counterweight in. There we go. Put that here, and I'm just going to use some of these zip ties. Okay, so that's all on there. I can add the telescope back in a minute here. But before I do, I want to go ahead and add on the guide scope. And I always do it this way. I don't know why. It's just a long tradition of mine. I like to undersling the guide scope like this out in front. And works well for me. I've never had an issue with guiding this way. I know a lot of people put them on top of the telescope, but I've always done it out front like this. And it provides a nice sort of counterbalance and weight to the camera and filter wheel by putting the guide stuff out here. So to attach the guide scope, it doesn't quite work with this Ascar part because of the hollowed out Vixen dovetail. So you can see it doesn't really sit on there. So I'm just going to use a matching piece, a connecting piece rather, which is this nice little small rig cheese plate, just to provide a little connection there. And it will also extend the guide scope out a little bit further, which should give me more clearance with the mount. So that'll be helpful. So I'm going to do something like that. Okay, so here we go. Let me find a good screw to attach this. Actually, I'm going to first attach it to my guide scope like this. Okay, so now that cheese plate is nice and secure on there and isn't going to go anywhere. Also provides a nice little base for it here. And then I'm just going to attach that cheese plate to the bottom of the Vixen dovetail here to have the guide scope in this nice under sling mode. Oh, and before I put that on there, let me just mention this is the ZWO 30mm F4 mini guide scope. And I just have an old QHY 5L2M guide camera in there. For anyone that doesn't know, there's two ways you can sort of focus this kind of guide scope. One is you can just loosen these guys and push the guide camera in and out like that. The other way, and you're probably going to have to do a combination of both methods, is to unscrew the front objective lens like this, pushing it further out and extending the amount of travel between these two things, the sensor and the front objective lens. And then once you've unscrewed that a bit, just tighten it up with this red retaining ring right here. So this can come in and out like that. Probably when you get the mini guide scope, this will be screwed all the way back and you'll have to loosen it a bit and then tighten with this red retaining ring to find focus with the guide camera. And it can be sort of, you have to be patient with it. So just watch the stars and when you see a large star starting to come into focus, then you're really close and just very small movements here will bring it into fine focus. Okay, so let's find a screw to attach this to this. Okay, so I have two longer bolts here to connect up the dovetail with the cheese plates. I'm going to tighten those up. Whenever you can, you want to use two bolts to make any kind of connection. In the case of this one up here, I could only have room for one bolt. Okay, now we're getting there. We're almost ready to put the telescope back on. We have the guide scope all installed and secure out here in the front. We have USB and power all ready to go. Once we start cabling, we're going to have a lot of cables going on. So one thing that can help with that are little cable organizers. These are by SmallRig, but there's 3D printed parts you can buy or different things. These SmallRig ones are nice because they have a little central bolt here. So you can just attach them wherever you have a spare hole like on a dovetail or on one of these cheese plates. So this takes some experimentation. We might have to put the telescope on and then take it back off. But basically, I'm just going to put one in here where I think I'll want one. And I'm going to put one up here. Okay, now we're ready to put the telescope back on. Alright, final step is I have all these cables that I have to add. I have a few little ideas for cable management, but let's see what we can do. So first step is we need to power the USB hub. So I'm just going to add this little guy. This is just a quick little tiny 12 volt lead. There we go. Second step, let's go ahead and add another short cable. This one just goes from filter wheel to the back of the ZWO camera. I'm sure I'm going to get asked, where did I get these little custom cables? It was from a company called Scope Cables. Last time I checked they did their website didn't seem to be up, but if you know of another sort of preferred custom cable maker, let me know in the comments and I'll try to pin that comment maybe. Because getting custom cables made is really nice for this kind of thing. I'd like to get more once I settle in on my preferred setups. Because with the rest of these cables, they're not going to be custom length, so we're going to have to do a little bit of cable managing. Okay, and one nice thing with cable managing is get these little Velcro strips to tie up the excess cabling. That can be really helpful. So let's add a dew heater band here. With a dew heater band, you want it as close to the front glass element as possible, so it's back there. So that's where I'm going to add this first dew heater band, like that. And I'm just going to stick the excess cabling right in, let's say here. Good enough. And then it's just going to go back into the pocket power box right into the back right there. Okay, and then we have another dew heater band for the guide scope. So that's going to go up here, do the same thing with this one. There we go. And now we have camera to USB hub. This is a USB 3 cable. Okay. And we have guide scope to USB. And you might be able to see what I'm doing here is I'm sort of managing all the cables and they go from wherever they're going and then they go back here, sort of right below the rotator. And then I can sort of tie them up to this ring that's holding the telescope. That's going to help clean it up a little bit. Okay, and in terms of other cables, we have this one. This is the long 6-foot or 9-foot USB 3. It's going to go from our USB hub to the laptop. And then we have a few others here. I have two different ones for my EQ 6R mount. This one is if I'm using battery, this one, sorry, with the cigar port. And then I have this one if I'm going off AC power. And then I just plug it into the pocket power box, turn it off AC. Okay, and then this cable is to connect to the EQ 6R mount. So it just goes right into the hub and then that end goes into the mount. And then I usually have a couple more cables. This one would go from the hub to my pole master for polar alignment, but then I can stop using it after that. Okay, so next up here, I'm just going to route some of these cables. I'm going to use my little, I don't know if you can see that. I'm going to use that so that this doesn't come loose or anything. It's a nice secure little fit right in there to hold that. I'm not sure, I could also use it down here maybe. Okay, and then what I did is I'm just going to, I just used two bongo ties. It's a specific kind of little rubber band thingamajig with a little wooden dowel. Just rubber band all of this cable mess right underneath the telescope right there. Okay, so this is the finished product and it looks still a little bit messy. It would be better if I could get some more custom cable lengths. But it's very functional and it does everything that I want. We have due control, we have plenty of USB ports available so I can add on the mount and a QHY pole master and those other things I mentioned. And we have plenty of space down here for balancing with this all sort of balanced out. Okay, and then one more cool thing I want to show you with this setup now that it's like this is by putting this small rig counterweight on this side like this to balance out this mass over here. What we can do is actually let's say that we wanted a framing where the filter wheel was more over here. And so now it's heavy on this side. What I can do is because this has another little one quarter inch thread there is I can just add on another small rig counterweight to continue balancing it left to right like that. So it's pretty neat I thought. Or if this was rotated this way then I could find a place over on the other side to add this counterweight. Or just change out this counterweight for a smaller counterweight because I have these in 200, 150 grams, all kinds of different denominations. As far as balancing front to back one thing that you can sort of do just before you even get your rig out is just find the fulcrum with your finger or with like a pencil or something like this. So I can tell that the fulcrum is right around there which is perfect. And so after I've really figured that out I can maybe make a mark here on the dovetail or even better than a permanent mark is just like a little piece of tape so then if you change anything out you can just change where the middle balance point is. But then it makes it a lot easier just when you put your whole system onto the mount to know about roughly where it's going to balance front to back. Okay, since this video I'm sure is over 20 minutes long you're now seeing all of my current members here on my Patreon campaign and if you want to see your name in the credits of future long Nebula Photos videos you can sign up over on Patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. And we now have over 500 members so it's a big cool community and there are a bunch of benefits outside of just your name in the credits of long videos. Some of those benefits include I now I did one exclusive video and I'm working on a second exclusive video just for Patreon. There are monthly Zoom chats where you can ask questions of me and other people on the chat. There is a Discord community which is really cool very vibrant lots of stuff going on there including monthly imaging challenges with prizes a quarterly group imaging project where we're all working on the same deep sky object together. And Patreon also has lots of different communication methods you can direct message me straight through Patreon.com you can also do it on Discord and so there's a lot of cool ways to connect and really get involved. And so if you want to accelerate your learning further after watching some of my videos consider joining over on Patreon and starts at just $1 a month and again the link is patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. Till next time this has been Nico Carver at Nebula Photos Clear Skies.