Observatory roofs seem to be my Achilles heel. By 2023 the third iteration of the roof was beginning to get difficult to open again. Rusty trolley wheel axles being the primary culprit. I was also unhappy with the amount of moisture getting into the observatory. We live at 220 metres and regularly are enveloped in low cloud and winds that will drive rain vertically up through the smallest of gaps. Most of this wet…
IC1396
Well it’s been a very long while since I did any astrophotography. The guys in the club have been very active this year and their enthusiasm started to rub of on me. I knew I had some data taken during one of the Covid lockdowns in 2020, so I updated Pixinsight and went to find the files. The subs were many more than I thought. I did loose a few to cloud, but in…
Observing/Imaging Session 4, June
It looks like completion of the new observatory happened at just the right time. While I’m writing this in July – and the weather at the moment has been awful by the way – first light took place in early June, where like the Spring of 2020, we had a run of about six weeks of clear sky nights. This run was so consistent that you didn’t really need to look at a weather…
A bit of a clear out
There is a saying that’ You can never have too many cameras’. While I’m guilty of practicing this, there comes a time when where a good Spring cleanout is needed. The first to go was the SQ-Ai. The battery holder design quirk was starting to annoy me and I got myself an earlier SQ body that takes a single battery, to replace it. The other problem was the 40mm f/4. With the fixed lens…
Old Toy Alert
With the demise of my Canon A1, I was looking for something to replace it, as I have nothing else that shoots 35mm. I came across a Canon P review on Youtube and like the idea of trying a rangefinder. The review mentioned Peter Dechert’s book on the full Canon rangefinder line up from the 1935 Hansa to the 1968 Canon 7s, which seemed a good place to start looking for what model to…
New Toy Alert.
Is this the prettiest modern camera you have ever seen? Well I think so, and if you see that even a year or so after its release, there was and still is, a long waiting list to get your hands on one, then thousands of others think so as well. Even secondhand examples are selling for more than the retail price on Ebay. Bonkers. So, looking at all my other cameras, this seems an…