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…
Observing Session: 28, December
Having woken at 4am this morning a quick glance through the window showed stars is abundance. There aren’t many things that will get me up at ‘Stupid O’Clock’ but Comet ISON is one of them. However…..the wheels started to come off from the start! The mount decided to loose its alignment model, so did a cold start and tried to rebuild it. Unfortunately, the Red Dot finder batteries were dead, so it took two…
Geminid Meteor Scatter Observations: 29, November – 18, December
Having had a problem with the data collection during the Leonids in November, I’m glad that my Geminid observations over the last two weeks seems to have been successful.As I mentioned in my entry on 3, November, I wanted to use the output from the Plotter rather than the scripted output of SpectrumLab. The reasons for this are : The Plotter output can be set to record a minimum and maximum power reading every…