Jupiter 20161206
Surprisingly, it was “clear” again this morning, against all predictions from last evening. Rolled outside around 05:15 EST to low level fog and -5C and a frozen stuck roll off…
Jupiter 20161123
The first powerup of the 20cm meade lx200gps (circa 2003) after the operation showed a display full of garbage characters. The second powerup showed normal operation… yay! The first pass…
meade lx200gps battery replacement
As it turns out, when starting up a Meade LX200GPS telescope (circa 2003), and it displays a few rows of “taking GPS fix”, this means that the internal battery is…
KAON Saturday 2016 November 12
Greetings partially clear skies! For the first time in awhile the skies were clear enough to set up on the observing deck! The Kingston Astronomy Outreach Network (KAON) open house…
Jacking the Observatory
The Tardis Observatory is now up to 3 years old, and over that time the wooden 2×6 rails the 5″ wheels run on have degraded, warped, moved, and become rougher.…
possible fireball Tuesday 2016 October 04
There were twitter reports this morning of a possible fireball last night around 22:30 EDT. As always, media and other 3rd hand reports come with very little detail and timings…
Raspberry Pi projects #2 and 3
We have completed the R&D portions of projects 2 and 3 with the Raspberry Pi and am amazed at how flexible these things are. #2 was as a display controller…
Loud Boom! that was not Susan Ivanova*
Woke up Sunday morning to twitter and web reports of a loud noise Saturday evening, 2016 Sept 24th around 20:50 edt. http://www.kingstonregion.com/news-story/6877053-mysterious-boom-startles-south-frontenac-residents/. Local television also covered the story: http://www.ckwstv.com/2016/09/25/128535/ The…
Collimation for fun
Much more time has gone into the Torus telescope project this summer. The latest results from last night show a good night coarse collimation. The plan was daytime coarse, nighttime…
Saturn 20160826
After drying out the imaging laptop for a week, it was fired up for a quick imaging run of Saturn on Friday evening, after returning from a field trip to…
short book review
Exploring Mars by Robert S. Richardson It doesn’t take long getting into the book that yes indeed, it was published in 1954. No landing on Mars, travel to Mars, or…
Perseid 2016 peak
The total count for the night was 58, of which one of them looks suspiciously like an alien spacecraft veering off course in just over 6 hours. The first recorded…
Perseid runup 2016
It has been surprisingly clear in the runup to the 2016 Perseid meteor shower. Over the last few days we have had captured on our allsky2 system: Tue 20160802: 14…
Mars 20160718
Was imaging the moon last night just after sunset and managed to start two and only two runs of Mars when the bus stopped and all the mosquitos got out…
Mars 2016 June 23
We went out Thursday evening 2016 June 23rd after sunset.. ie 21:00EDT! wow! Found Mars pretty quickly and ran 10 imaging sessions from 01:11 UT to 01:28UT.. only 17 minutes!…