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…
annual daylight saving time rant
Sunday 2018 March 11th, a day that will live in infamy! Yet another (@#%(*^%@#!! daylight saving time switch. Luckily, some with pull are starting to think about it now as…
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…
Windows 10 kills another computer
Microsoft Windows 10 just did another update on one of our old data logging computers, a Toshiba Netbook NB305. After the reboot, it was unresponsive. Many reboots later it was…
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!…
2018
Welcome to 2018. Welcome to Mars. How do these two statements connect? With this image of the Dora cat with green laser eyes and a very nifty mat. We came…
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.…
linux fedora 26 server upgrades to v27
From: http://news.softpedia.com/news/server-edition-of-fedora-27-linux-is-finally-here-but-it-lacks-modularity-518967.shtml Three weeks after the launch of the Fedora 27 Linux operating system, the Fedora Project announced the release of Fedora 27 Server edition, but it’s not what you…
Memory woes
There have been server issues for the last few days… hard to troubleshoot and diagnose to be sure. Thought it was a bad mariadb database, maybe bad guys getting into…
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…
December?
Wow.. another December already? Already three months plus past our first total solar eclipse, out in Southeastern Wyoming. We continue on experimenting with Raspberry Pi model 2B microcomputers and have…
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…