The forecast was for clear skies and that’s exactly what I got. It’s a pity that we are now getting to that time of the year when it never really seems to get really dark. It also means you can’t see anything meaningful before about 11:30 🙁 Conditions were pretty good. Seeing was perfect and apart from a few clouds way off in the far horizon, transparencey was good. It was also the first session…
Lyrids Meteor Shower
With the recording of the Geminid shower last year producing a graph that seemed to match pretty well with data collected and published by the the IMO, I felt that the set up of my radio telescope was working well enough to capture last months Lyrids. Running between the 16th and 25th this gave enough of a window to allow the plot to show both the general background activity both before and after the…
Observing Session 23, April
Nearly the end of April and this has been my first proper observing session of 2014. A really terrible start to the year! The one or two clear nights in March weren’t helped buy pointing problems on the G11. The RA motor decided to go tits up and slews were 20° off, at boot up. I had to resort to a ‘Cold Start’ and rebuild the pointing model. Things will be okay for 10…
…Another New Toy
Well when I say another new toy, I mean this one is only just to play with occasionally. My local astronomy club Kernow Astronomers acquired a number of Solar scopes to do outreach work with a number of local schools. One of the three is a Lunt 60THa. While not being used for outreach, the scope is available for club members to use, and I managed to borrow it for a week to play…
A New Toy
I’ve been a bit behind keeping the blog up to date. Apart from a couple of one hour windows where I was able to stick the TMB through the conservatory door and do a little manualy navigated observing, those clear crisp clear nights of early Spring, have been few and far between. As I mentioned in my last post, I have a new toy, or more precisely, my partner has, in Pentax’s O-GPS1. Primarily the…
Welcome to 2014
Well another year has passed so welcome to 2014. It was difficult to judge how successful 2013 was for observational astronomy at the DBO, but fortunately Astroplanner can display all sorts of interesting stats. The one thing the table doesn’t show are the number of clear nights that I was able to open up though. Manually counting those came to 33 nights or 9%. While that doesn’t sound a lot, it’s more that I thought…