Gina

Thought I had DSLR photos of the build but can't find them ATM. These are webcam pictures. I had a live webcam running as I was building the observatory for members her to watch on my website.

There seem to be some photos missing and some that were hosted on PhotoBucket have been blurred and a horrible PhotoBucket emblem added totally ruining the image.

This shows the very first images I took with my first telescope on the new pier. This also shows the magnification the telescope gives compared with an ordinary camera as shown in the previous quote. Could be worth including.

Pier with mount fitted. ATM I'm just collecting photos to see which I want to include - it can't be all of these.

A bit of humour.

I wont be covering the block and pier build in any detail and might not include it at all.

This isn't the SMC version but may come apart the same way. I'll test it for imaging first though, before trying to take it apart. Might be fine.

The lens that got wet has now dried out and seems fine looking straight through it. Looking at an angle the droplets seem to have left little marks on the coating. Don't know whether that will affect the images until I try it. Here is a photo, lit by my desk lamp.

Conclusion - even without going into technicalities, astro imaging simply won't go into this short a talk! I'm going to have to leave a lot out. Some things could be left for the following Q&A session.

Hmmm... I think I'm going to be hard pressed to cram all I want into 40 minutes. It would be nice if I could cover all these :- Types of telescope including camera lenses Types of observatory Types of camera Methods of supporting the imaging system - tripod, pier etc. Different sorts of night sky object - moon, planets, galaxies, nebulae... Solar imaging - white and NB Image processing - stacking - colour processing... It simply won't go into a mere forty minutes!

Why do you have an observatory? Taking night sky pictures needs a lot of equipment, very carefully set up and though some people set up and take down every time they do any astronomy this takes a lot of time and is a problem when the equipment needs very careful setting up. With an observatory all the equipment can be set up virtually permanently and you only have to open the roof to be ready to go. Why is your observatory like a strange garden shed when "proper" observatories are dome shaped? This leads to the sorts of observatory and a very quick discussion of types of amateur telescope covering. This could take up half the time itself if I let it.

I think I have an idea of how to explain a telescope and the need for a solid mounting (pier/tripod and mount). "I think most of you will have used binoculars and realised how difficult they are to hold still and the more magnification the more difficult this is. Now consider a very much higher magnification of say, a hundred times rather than eight or ten times and you can see why telescopes need a good solid mounting." Of course, this doesn't mention time exposures but I don't want to get too much into that as it gets technical. Nor does it cover widefield imaging but again this has to be outside my brief. There is so much to cover without covering widefield. I think the same may apply to NB imaging - explaining very narrow band optical filters would be far too technical. I may be able to explain NB imaging by saying that there are special coloured filters that only let light through from particular glowing gases. I can say that hydrogen produces a deep red glow and oxygen a bluey-green or turquoise, glow. I could demonstrate this with two-colour images such as the Cygnus Loop (thought there is some SII in this). I think I really need to offer some sort of explanation of NB imaging as this is my main sort of imaging.

40m is not long to describe astro photography. Indeed 40m wouldn't be long to describe terrestrial photography. We had a talk on photography at a WI meeting last week which lasted an hour. I got the impression that that tended to be too technical.

Back to thinking about my talk. This will be practically all pictures with minimal explanation to avoid any technical stuff which much of the audience wouldn't understand (or so I've been told). So apart from pretty pictures of nebulae and galaxies I plan photos of the astro kit and construction of my observatory. The trouble is, I have hundreds of photos of the site excavations, concrete work and construction that will need a really serious prune. I need to sort out a time-line of pics to show the build without overdoing the photos. I think it would be good to include the various weather conditions with a bit of humour showing a waterlogged building site. It has been suggested that I include image processing and mainly I agree. The problem is that this is very technical so I shall need to work out how to describe this as simply as possible. One thing I would like to show is the improving image as more and more subs are added to the stack. Explaining the stacking process in lay terms is not going to be easy but this is the principle that is the main part of astro image processing. Another important part is combining monochrome images to form a colour image. How does one explain this to people whose only knowledge of photography is pointing the camera at something and pressing the button? Few people will know how coloured pictures are formed from different coloured dots/pixels or the photographic colour film process of layers on monochrome images derived using colour filters.

Wiring up of the control box nearly complete.

Could be indeed.

Another update to the circuit diagram showing the motor driver connections.