Observatory Renos
This is the main work surface in the observatory, located on the north side. In the roof rebuild, the work surface was relocated to the south side, so as to…
SCGO roof 2
720x480p 7MB video clip made with ffmpeg (converting still image .jpg to .mpg video, handbrake (conversion to mkv to allow movie maker to open it), movie maker for windows to…
High winds, roof flies, RIP SCGO
Yesterday, Wednesday 2018 April 4th, Eastern Ontario had a wind storm. It’s not the first we have had. Back in 2003? we had the remnants of a hurricane roll over…
Conjunction moon venus mercury
It was a rare event on Sunday 2018 March 18th, a conjunction of the Moon, Venus and Mercury in the western horizon after sunset. Taken with our old Canon DSLR…
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…