Stargazer33

23 minutes ago, DaveSw said:

 (Mylar based Kodak product from my horde of darkroom stuff - '70s vintage)

😁 ahh yes, I remember the 70s well! 

Great first attempt! You should be very happy with that. The shortish exposures have contained the core and stopped it from blowing out. The dust in the arms is showing itself too.

After you reprocess, if you upload the image in a lossless format, such as .png or .bmp, we can better enjoy your efforts. 🙂

That looks like it goes immediately after the 'scope not before the camera. 

Your camera/barlow should go in here!

Because the pivot point is so low I don't think it will be too hard to open. I might increase the side wall height, as John suggested, so lightening the opening part. If I keep the hinged wall low and therefore the pivot point there shouldn't be an excessive amount of weight. 

It's still really in the 'imagineering' stage as the folks at Disney would say! I may decide to go for something completely different. It really depends on the availability of raw materials; either timber or a ready made shed of suitable size/design.

Thanks John!

Unfortunately we've got 40' - 50' trees 30' to the west of where the observatory would go, so it wouldn't be limiting my view. It would make the opening section lighter however and therefore easier to move.

On 14/09/2021 at 22:41, tony8gj said:

Hi there, thank you for sharing the instructions.

Did you have to trim the LED string lights? Or did you use the whole 5m length? 

Was it just one circular piece of Perspex/acrylic sheet you used? 

Thanks again,

Tony.

Yes I  used the whole length, but there are marked lines where you can cut without breaking the circuit.  To be honest I  am thinking about reducing the overall size and therefore the length of the LED string as it is a bit too bright even on the low setting.

Just the one disk cut from the sheet.

HTH

😆

Zombie thread. 🧟‍♂️

That's nice. You've retained the star colours very well. 

I've had many a night like yours; only without the positive outcome at the end!

1 hour ago, Tommohawk said:

Could have brought my big newt and done some planets... but brought my wife instead. No room for them both! 

I think you need to get your priorities straight!  😉😯😄

Please don't tell my wife I said that! 🤫🤕

Whilst browsing through astronomy videos on YouTube,  I came across a couple of videos on fitting a peltier cooler to standard ZWO cameras. I had been thinking of doing this to my ASI385MC since I made a coolbox for my DSLR back in 2016. Martin Pyott's (Astronomy 4 Beginners) build just had a heatsink and fan; Ewan, Astronomy Addict added a cheap Chinese temperature sensor and controller.

I have added a cpu cooling unit instead of just a fan:

I purchased a hotshoe adaptor from ebay to use to attach the cool plate to the camera and to act as a bit of a cold finger, getting as close to the sensor as I could without actually opening the camera. I chose an aluminium one as the thermal properties would be the same as the camera body. I had to cut down the thread to fit into the tripod mount hole on the camera and also round off the  corners of the hot shoe plate to fit into the recess I cut into the cold plate in order to get a flush surface for the peltier to sit against. I used an old forstner bit to remove just enough material from the cold plate to allow the hot shoe adaptor to sit flush.

I bought the Arctic Freezer 34 esports tower cpu cooler to help speed up heat dissipation from the hot plate side of the peltier. The cold and hot plates are 100 x 100 x 3 mm aluminium plates. The Arctic Freezer 34 esports come with various fixings for different CPUs, including double ended threaded stand-offs. Drilling and tapping four holes in the corners of the cold plate allowed me to screw these in.

I cut some thin foam I had lying around to 100 mm square and cut a hole in the centre the size of the peltier. I poked the wires through the foam and then using some MX-4 thermal paste on the cold side of the peltier, I placed the foam/peltier onto the cold plate. More MX-4 paste was spread onto the hot side of the peltier and then the hot plate, with larger holes cut into the corners so the stand-offs could pass through, was placed on top.

Yet more MX-4 paste was spread onto the plate of the cpu cooler and this was then attached to the stand-offs using the supplied thumb nuts (?).

The camera screwed onto the cooler:

The next part was a bit of a pain! I couldn't find a project box of the dimensions that I wanted and the one I eventually bought had large areas cut out to enable securing , which left me with even less room for the wiring. This coupled with the atrocious Chinese to English translation for the temperature controller had me muttering under my breath some rather unpleasant things!

Eventually I managed to get everything wired up, but not before I had to order another Bionix fan after allowing the magic factory smoke to escape from the original one when I got the wiring mixed up! I knocked up a small bracket to mount the control box to the cooler and with the temperature probe placed next to the camera I put the insulated cup around the camera body.

I forgot to take a picture at the time, but during the first trial, I had a reading of 4°C from the temperature sensor and it was still falling when I turned the unit off. As I was testing it inside, a lot of condensation was forming on the cold plate and on the nosepiece and ir/uv filter of the camera. The sensor however looked clear.

I may have to buy one of the ZWO camera dew heater units or possibly knock something up myself to keep the filter clear of condensation. 

With hindsight I think I should have gone for a cpu cooler of this design: 

This would mean less side force on the nosepiece.

With the replacement decking nearing completion and the new flower boarders in and planted up, I've accumulated enough Brownie points to at least start thinking about an observatory! 

Our garden faces West, but our back boundary neighbours have mature beech, sycamore and Ash trees at the bottom of their gardens so our sky views are severely restricted. This combined with our southern neighbour having a large magnolia close to the boundary fence means this view is also largely restricted. We therefore have a limited amount of sunshine in our garden and being that the observatory needs to go near to the southern boundary, I don't want it to be too big and block out even more sun. Because of other things we want to do in the garden, I didn't want outriggers for a roll off roof. The large draw sliders were an option but they seemed a little expensive for the sizes required.

Looking on-line at various types of shed, I thought that the pent design would give the most amount of sunlight if the highest part of the roof faces south. I wanted the roof to be as waterproof as possible so decided on an overlap with a lip to prevent water from being blown under and into the observatory. 

I made a model from balsa wood and have animated its opening and closing to show what my thoughts are. In the model there is one prop leg but in the full size build there would be two, one at each corner.

In the model I have a slim bifold door between the warm room and the 'scope room. This may change to a sash window type of access depending on findings during the build. The size of the observatory is intended to be 8 x 4 with a 4 x 4 warm room and a 4 x 4 'scope room; due to space available for the build. This probably means building from scratch rather than adapting a pre-made shed. So the build my be delayed until timber prices come back to  more sensible levels!

That is absolutely stunning Neil. The level of detail is so fine. I love the rilles in Sinus Medii. Rima Hyginus shows up really well. 

Lovely image Neil and great control of the exposure! Very nice. 

That's very nice Geof! Really clear colour banding on the planet. 👏

Have you enabled 'HighSpeed' transfer and what is your 'USB Traffic' setting?

Nice! Andromeda looks a bit magenta to me. You've controlled the core well in your processing. Nice placement in the frame too. A 0.7x or 0.8x reducer would give you a nice amount of space (do you see what I did there 🙄) around the galaxy. 

Nice dust Lanes and a good size in the frame. I would have probably tried to rotate the frame to get Andromeda more across the diagonal. I think it would also benefit from lightening a little too. 

Very nice image all the same. 👍

That file is apt_thumbs. You're still looking at the thumbnail file and not the main image.

Before she died my grate aunt and her family lived in Burley in The New Forest. They had people from London move in next to them. Because the new people didn't like the dark they had a number of streetlights installed in their garden and had them on all night, every night!

Lovely image Bryan! It really 'pops'. It feels like you could hold that bubble in your hand. 

P.S. Don't knock things just because they're 'old'! 😁

Amazing albedo showing on Ganymede's surface. Nice animation too.

When you say it was working some months ago, was this before daylight saving time? Have you adjusted for Summertime? Sorry I don't know what BST is called in Bulgaria! 

I made my own which incorporates a USB hub and an auto focuser:

As of today, it looks like this project has been removed from the Sourceforge site. All search attempts for AAF2 or Tekkydave return '0 Results'.

Ah! The familiar events of an evenings astro photography! 😉

At least you managed to capture something. 👍  Well done for persevering!