A New Power Supply

We are constantly looking to improve our 16” Cassegrain telescope system. Sometimes this is dramatic, like optimizing the optical alignment, other times it just involves replacing stuff that is broken or will break soon. There was a large, old power supply in the system which was buzzing and dropping in voltage output. It hadn’t actually failed, but almost certainly would have soon. We replaced it with a much smaller, lighter modern power supply.

Old vs. New

On the right is the old, failing power supply. On the left is the new one. It is a little mysterious why there was such a large power supply in the system. This is a 24 Volt DC supply whose only purpose was to provide power to two dozen small relays. Each relay uses less than 0.04 amp of current, so in total the power supply needs to provide less than 1 amp of current. This is very little.

The new power supply in place