Observatory updates
Sunday 2018 March 11 More work continued on the Tardis Observatory this weekend. The eastern door hinge mounts were replaced with better, stronger and thicker wood, as the door was…
New mount approaching first light.
A small dovetail does the trick in attaching the Meade DS90 Optical Tube Assembly (OTA) to the Meade mount. A layer of cork is between the ring and the dovetail…
2018 Jan Lunar Eclipse
This is the baseline image taken the night before the Total Lunar Eclipse. This was 2018 Jan 30 at 18:20 EST with an old Canon DSLR with a 300mm lens…
Celestron – disassemble
This is our Celestron C80 refractor. It too had dirty optics, in particular, the spacers between the primary lens doublet had moved away from the edge and into the central…
cloud=no astro=disassemble!
What does an astronomer do when it is cloudy and very cold? Not much astronomy to be sure. So instead of observing the stars with telescopes, lets do some disassembly!…
Meade LXD55 mount
This is my new (used) mount, a Meade LXD55. It comes with a battery holder for x8 D size batteries, but I suspect it would go through that pretty quick.…
Pier adieu
You know its going to be a bad day when you see a reciprocating saw in the observatory This is the 2nd of 2 piers that have had to be…
Fireball sat 2017nov11 00:10:15 EST
Reviewing allsky camera events overnight with coffee this morning and found this great big fireball in the north, heading north at 05:10:15 UT 2017nov11 -5 hours puts it at Saturday…
RadioJove system repairs and mods
Last week we noticed that the cable connected to the southern dipole antenna of the RadioJove system was broken/disconnected. Not a surprise as it has been up for over six…
Allsky2 Updates
The Allsky2 computer system suffered a drive failure a month or so ago. Luckily it was part of a software RAID setup, so there was not a lot of lost…
Aurora 20170928
Just before 02:00 Thursday morning we were outside and imaged some aurora stuff. It’s been *ages* since we saw aurora stuff! This is a 30sec exposure on the 13 year…
Solar Eclipse Image Processing
For the 2017 August 21st Total Solar Eclipse, we were onsite in Wyoming taking images with a 13 year old Canon DSLR with a 75-300mm lens, on a manual non-tracking…
Solar Totality 20170821
This is it. Totality. The complete eclipse of the Sun by the Moon. It was a long trip from the Kingston Ontario area to Wyoming and a longer trip back.…
The Great 2017 Solar Eclipse Road Trip
At mostly the last minute, we decided to drive to Wyoming to witness the 2017 August 21 Total Solar Eclipse. Why Wyoming? Mainly because the historical weather records showed us…