Managed to get quite a lot done this Bank Holiday weekend. Friday night was clear and we managed to open up the Observatory and get some observing done. The G11 is still playing up and I suspected the memory battery cell was flat, so I loose all settings when I power down. That’s been rectified now, so will have to rebuild the pointing model the next clear night we get. Collimation is still not…
Astronomy Section.
I’ve finally decided to end my Windows hosted server and revert back to good old Unix. This means that the Astronomy section of my webby which was all coded for ASP will no longer run. It’s going to take a few weeks to untangle all the text from the Access database and republish all the images back into individual HTML pages. The new Observatory, the DBO 2.1 as it is now called, is now…
Triplet
Looking back at my Flickr, I see the last time I got creative with a camera was way, way back in April. My newly restored interest in Astronomy and the construction of a new Observatory has been taking up most of my time – to the detriment of anything terrestrial. I’m hoping that a trip up to Manchester this weekend for a Flickr trundle, will kick start things and I’m able to get back…
A 9 day old Moon
Unlike deep sky imaging where exposures tend to run into hours, the Moon can normally be captured in a matter of seconds. While this composite of seven webcam video files took a total of about 30 minutes to capture, it was possible to do each section in between banks of cloud rolling in the from the West. Unfortunately full cloud cover took hold before the last three sections could be captured. Nevertheless it was…
The DBO Pheonix
I got hooked on Astronomy in 2001, which four years later resulted in the building of my own permanent observatory – the DBO – in 2005. After an initial burst of activity resulting in a couple of dozen images, there seemed to be a period of a couple of years where the observatory was permanently covered in cloud. So much in fact that, I lost all interest in taking astronomical images, for something more…
iPhone and Rolleicord
It’s always the way! You go to somewhere like Port Issac for a trundle, and end up getting the best piccys from someones landing in Wadebridge. Oh well, if having a plan and completing it was easy, everyone would be doing it!! I recently upgraded to the latest version of Hipstamatic ( 2.0.1) on the iPhone. Apart from the John S lens and Blanco film, I just can’t get on with some of the…