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…
Observing Session 21, November
Its seems like an age since I was able to open up the observatory and look through a telescope….and I’m right. The 3, November was the last time . Even more amazing was that the technology didn’t go tits up. I fired everything up, slewed to my first star and the target was well within the FOV of a 40 eyepiece. Apparently, I was not the only one who’s first outing for a while went…
What Balmy Autumnal Evenings?
Well apart from one session out at the scope in early September, the weather these last seven weeks has been dire. I’ve got to go back to December of last year when I was only able to get out once during a month. November looks as though it’s going to be even worse, with not one clear night so far. While we have had lots of clear skies during the day, the relatively high…