Gina

Yes, pretty much I may just see if the FO rain gauge is working and possibly make my own later. One thing wanted is a bit of heating when the temperature drops below freezing so that snow or freezing rain can be catered for. Just printed the wind vane hub. Was about to change over to white for the encoder but found the white wouldn't go through the 2mm PTFE tube in spite of claiming to be 1.75mm Wonder if the translucent filament would work alright - should be almost as reflective. Or there's pink.

That looks fine I may well make myself a new one - can't be any worse that the Fine Offset brand cheapo one I should be able to produce something rather more accurate with any luck. I agree with an optical sensor - magnet and reed switch will slightly impede the motion. An alternative would be Hall switch with magnet - there is no iron in the Hall device to pull on the magnet and a Hall switch is simpler than LED and phototransistor.

Now 3D printing a dew shield for the 105mm lens.

Simple and complicated ones on thingiverse I just used a standard funnel on the top to increase the collection area. There's at lot about my earlier weather station projects on another forum site. One of my threads.

If you have a 3D printer available you might be interested in tipping bucket thingiverse

One possibility might be to modify the manual arrangement with some method of emptying the water. There are a number of ways to automate measuring the water height in a measuring cylinder such as ultrasonic - which I use to check the water in the sump under my observatory. Maybe a combination of level sensing and tipping bucket... OTOH do we actually need accurate rain measurement?

Tipping bucket They aren't very accurate and calibration depends on rain rate. The one I have is just the one from the Maplin kit which is a standard Chinese clone same as many others. It's just a plastic bucket - very crude. Replacement cost of whole rain gauge is just a few pounds I would like something better but what? I might have a think about this but with so many people failing to improve on the tipping bucket for an automatic weather station I guess I'll need tho think pretty hard

I'm using the standard tipping bucket with a reed switch and magnet on the bucket. Quite a large funnel feeds it. Or I should say was using.... Not using anything ATM I'll see if I can find more details.

When going through some boxes in my store room I came across one containing some of the bits for my weather station, so had a look. I don't think there's a lot needed to get this working. Last time I looked at it I was stumped by not having a decent 3D printer working but having spent time on my Pilot printer recently it's now working well so I'm in a position to further this project a bit more. It might prove to be "light relief" from some of the others I've just tidied up the wind vane hub and encoder so I can now print that. It would be nice to be able to display wind direction and speed indoors. The model for these two parts is shown above - it will be printed in two parts and glued together. I haven't got a two colour printer yet. I'll be looking back through this thread to see where I had got to. In view of my new knowledge of the Raspberry Pi 3 I might change some of the electronics. For one thing I don't want long 1-wire cabling eaten by rodents as has happened in the past. An RPi 3 with WiFi would only need power to the remote electronics which would be easier to rodent proof. The other problem is that 1-wire seems to be dropped by Maxim - the only manufacturers of the devices.

A quick BPP in PixInsight using an old master flat. Screenshot of PI after histogram stretching. This really needs a lot more data - Simeis 147 is very faint. Amp glow is showing quite badly so, for some reason, my darks aren't doing all they should do. Wonder if I should take more subs (I use 80).

122 subs passed the Blink test - not too bad. I'll be taking some flats today to go with them (if everything isn't frozen up!!).

Had to pack up. Very hard frost with a couple of mm of frost on everything that didn't have any heating! And yes, the lens was dewed up. I wiped it off but almost immediately it came back. The stars are remarkably clear and bright but I wasn't ready and that's that! Maybe I'll be better prepared for next month's clear night

Here an integration of 68 Ha subs of 120s calibrated with master bias and master dark but no flat as I haven't taken any yet with this setup. It needs a lot more data. Histogram stretched in GIMP. Full resolution.

Had a thought... Somewhere I have a Jupiter brand lens of somewhere near that focal length. Have to see if I can find it. Found a Jupiter 9 85mm f2 lens on ebay that looks just like my lens as I remember it - wonder if it is Here another image with the 105mm f2.8 lens. This is full resolution in PNG format without any histogram stretching. I think this lens is even better quality than the 135mm.

A lens focal length of around 90mm would be nice for this. My next one down id 55mm with nearly twice the FOV. Looks like I should try zoom lenses. Maybe I'll print some mountings and focus gears for one or two of my zoom lenses. Downside is the extra exposure required with the smaller aperture.

Yes, this is it - histogram stretched in PixInsight.

I think if I just get IC410 and Simeis 147 in frame and don't bother about IC405 I might just get all of Simeis 147 in.

Wants a bit more FOV to get IC405 and Simeis 147 in the frame. Here is a much stretched 120s sub with IC405 and 410 in the lower right corner and Simeis 147 just about showing in the top left.

Clear night sky and imaging the IC405, IC410 and Simeis 147 area in Ha - 2m subs with gain of 600 and -30C. No dew shield yet so just hoping...

Here is the integration of 310 OIII subs of Orion's Sword. Screenshot of histogram stretched PixInsight image. The calibration isn't working right with a background gradient lightening towards the bottom. Can be taken out with DBE I expect but shouldn't happen.

Put all my OIII subs through Blink to reject any poor ones and dump those after Orion went out of sight leaving "888 items, totalling 29.1 GB". Took matching flats today or at least I thought I did but PI says they're Ha! Just have to hope it doesn't make much difference. Now feeding the first 300 or so OIII lights plus flats and master bias and dark, through BPP. I am hoping to repeat the operation with a slightly wider FOV though with shorter FL lens so that I can get M78 in the frame. Hoping the 105mm lens will do it - next lens is 55mm or 45mm which is a big difference. The 55mm is f1.8 at full aperture and this doesn't seem to work very well, maybe because the Astrodon filters only work well down to around f3. Stopping down will give diffraction spikes from the iris.

Seem to have about 900 subs before the object dropped below the horizon (or trees).

Have now downloaded 670 subs and looked at the last one and it's fine Still continuing but I can now divide these up into manageable lots and look at them with Blink but lunch calls first

Just applied a wodge of updates to PI. I don't play Minesweeper or other games but surfing - yes. I wouldn't have thought surfing eg. here, would use much in the way of system resources. Or is it that PI takes over and stops other processes from working? The stacking process could certainly do with speeding up. I have already found that PI (or my Linux machine) can't handle too many hundreds of images at a time and I have to split the data up into lumps of 200 subs for Blink, for example. Processing time seems mainly dependent on CPU speed or memory size and HD speed doesn't seem to affect it - SSD doesn't seem any better than HD. Happy New Year to you too

Sure will!!