Prep
Always a good idea to prep for a star party… in advance! Case in point, Fall’N’Stars 2010 Last year, you may remember, we took the Centre’s portable power pack (the…
July 4th – Day Nine
Sunday July 9th was the Annual General Meeting of the RASC and a very short 2nd National Council meeting. In the afternoon there were more talks by David Levy and…
July 3rd – Day Eight
Saturday July 3rd was the real start to the conference- paper sessions. There were two parallel streams in the morning, which means we each missed half of the talks. A…
Nearing the End of July
It’s been a very busy month but here are a few quick highlights of the last few weeks. * New deer fence: We built a 7′ high deer fence around…
Relay for Life
The Cancer Society Relay for Life was held in Napanee on Friday June 11th and we attended with telescopes and 100 packages of handouts with various astronomical stuff inside (Terry…
Theres something about concrete
For the last several months, we have noticed some motion in one or our two telescope piers in the observatory. This is never a good thing. The piers were built…
Spring Projects
While we are waiting for the ground to warm up and continue the gardening that we started in the last couple of weeks of really really warm weather (28 deg…
Blast from the past
This is an image from our old type I Barn Door tracker (from 1999), a wooden wedge designed for the barn door tracker (1999) and a wooden tripod that we…
-8 Iridium Flare
Saturday saw a raw Magnitude -8 Iridium flare over our observatory. This was in the southeast about 49 deg altitude. Mars was just above it and the group of stars…
solstice time!
Winter Solstice came by yesterday (Monday Dec 21, 2009) at 12:57pm EST. We did a little dance around the fire to celebrate… ok.. it was the BBQ. But we still…
winter is coming
It has been pretty mild up to now… only one big storm with snow and then rain and then freezeup, but all in all not too bad. In the next…