Flintstone Stargazing

Tonight, while slewing to Jupiter, after observing for an hour or two, my scope suddenly fell off the mount. I don’t know if I had it insufficiently locked or if I just failed to tighten the secondary screw, but it fell right off the mount onto the driveway. It hit first on the bottom (mirror) side, slightly denting the aluminum housing, but not the tube. It then bounced off of the eyepiece (my 26mm Meade Super Plossl), which was undamaged and then finally hit the focuser tube of my cheap 70mm scope, breaking that. During the time it bounced on the concrete, which seemed like forever and I couldn’t get there in time, I kept waiting to hear the sound of breaking glass, but I never did. When I examined the scope, other than the dent and the broken cheapo ($25) scope, everything’s pretty okay. The eyepiece is fine and I went ahead and reattached everything to test it out. It appears fine. I think the shaking unaligned the finder scope just a bit, but that’s easily fixed. The focuser seems to be working properly and the telescope seems to be working as it should.

Right now, I’m imaging, to kind of test it out and everything seems to be going fine. The feeling of dread that I had deep down in my chest was awful, but it all turned out about as well as it could. While I’ll need to fix the cheapo scope (or replace it), that’s really the extent of the damage. I’m really, really glad my cameras weren’t attached at the time or they would have borne what the eyepiece did. While I love that eyepiece, it’s one that would be easy and inexpensive to replace, unlike the cameras…