General / Maintenance / Techniques

Zen Autoguiding

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What is the sound of no relays clicking? I tried some unguided tracking tonight and captured the data so I could see what’s up with my mount. I had to find a […]

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Deep Sky / Gear / General / Long Exposure Photography / Observing Reports

NGC2244, The Rosette Nebula in Monoceros

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With the newly-tuned mount, I decided to try Pumpkin on some more unguided imaging. After the “baseline” from the previous night, I now wanted to see what this MFWB could really do. […]

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Gear / General / Maintenance

Worm OK, polar alignment needs work

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With an hour of The Rosette in the can, I decided to switch to 20m subframes instead of 5m. I only got 2 frames before the mount hit its safety limit. I’m […]

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Gear / General / Maintenance

Martin Farmer Wormblock installation notes

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The new MFWB showed up yesterday, and I knew that I needed some time to work on it, so I did the installation during the day today. Here are some notes about […]

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Deep Sky / Gear / General / Long Exposure Photography / Maintenance / Observing Reports

Pumpkin by her lonesome

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I mounted up Pumpkin by herself tonight. The mount’s been having a problem with guiding, very rough behavior in RA. I’m going to be tuning the mount up tomorrow, but the sky […]

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Gear / General / Maintenance

It's here! It's here!

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My new Martin Farmer Worm Block finally showed up tonight. It’s been in-transit from the UK for a week. I’ve had nothing but good reports about this monolithic worm block from the […]

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General / Maintenance / Observing Reports

suckerholes

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There was a brief moment between the stormfronts tonight, where I got to see a few stars and the really pretty crescent moon. Then the clouds closed back in. It’s been raining […]

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ATM / Electronics / Focuser / Gear / General / Maintenance / Observing Reports / Optics / Techniques / Technology

Murphy was an optimist.

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Clear Sky Clock said it would be cloudy all night, so of course it stayed 90% clear until about midnight, when it socked in. But I’m getting ahead of myself… I decided […]

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Maintenance

The way forward – mount tuning

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Given my strange “bell-curve” style tracking errors that I was getting last spring/summer, I am unconvinced that my mount is the source of the problem. I need to find and kill the […]

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Astro knowledge / Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

Pumpkin's Return — A breath of fresh air

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After 10 days of fighting Veronica, I’d had enough. Tonight, I swapped the camera back to Pumpkin, rebalanced, and tried my luck at two targets. With Cassiopeia showing above the house, I […]

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Techniques

Polar Alignment Calculations

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Here’s a page that derives Polar Alignment Calculations. (update 5/2020: the original site is gone, so I found the text on Wayback and am inserting it below. This is by the original […]

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Gear / Observatory / Telescope

Special Guest Star takes the mount at Hilltop O

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The Astro Jedi needed somewhere to store his light sab—- I mean, bucket, and I was only too happy to accommodate him. I have decided that I need to come to a […]

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General / Maintenance / Observatory

Dome shutter is motorized again!

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I finally decided to bite the bullet and fix the shutter motor. Things went sideways last winter, and I’ve been opening the shutter manually (and tying it shut with rope, so we […]

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ATM

Trixie 2017 – tube mods

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I finally got around to cutting the MTA-UTA tubes to length; the only eyepiece that would come to focus with the focuser spacer in place is the Televue 55mm Plossl. If I […]

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