Observatory roofs seem to be my Achilles heel. By 2023 the third iteration of the roof was beginning to get difficult to open again. Rusty trolley wheel axles being the primary culprit. I was also unhappy with the amount of moisture getting into the observatory. We live at 220 metres and regularly are enveloped in low cloud and winds that will drive rain vertically up through the smallest of gaps. Most of this wet…

Well it’s been a very long while since I did any astrophotography. The guys in the club have been very active this year and their enthusiasm started to rub of on me. I knew I had some data taken during one of the Covid lockdowns in 2020, so I updated Pixinsight and went to find the files. The subs were many more than I thought. I did loose a few to cloud, but in…

It looks like completion of the new observatory happened at just the right time. While I’m writing this in July – and the weather at the moment has been awful by the way – first light took place in early June, where like the Spring of 2020, we had a run of about six weeks of clear sky nights. This run was so consistent that you didn’t really need to look at a weather…

Here are my Solar sunspot counts for September. Not as many days as I did in August, but my first month using the same instrument setup and where I feel I have settled on a more consistent method in my observing workflow. A full 30 day solar cycle at 60 Solar Hours a sec rate The following are the drawings made at the eyepiece and are displayed with the Zenith up with the second…

My 3D printed solar filter is complete. Designed in Fusion 360 and printed in PLA on a Flashforge Adventurer 4 I decided to make it in two parts, so the Baader film is clamped between the inner L ring and the outer frame that slides over the dew shield on the scope. Rather than just relying on the clamping effect of the two halves to hold the baader film, I also applied a thin…

I’ve had a bit of an upgrade on the Solar scope front. Despite the 150mm aperture the 80mm glass solar filter was stopping the scope to the point, where any magnification above 50X turned the view to a blurry mush. With my current selection eyepieces, I was only able to use some pretty horrible – and very old- Meade 4000 series Plossls in the 26mm to 40mm range. The most obvious way to see…