SnakeyJ

All the way from Sweden and deposited on my door step by the courier three days earlier than expected - As it was palleted and weighed almost 70kg, it was left out in the rain until I got home from work! The box was a little soggy, but it was well packed and wrapped in polythene, so no problems (other than a long explanation to my wife) - Fair to say it is a bit of a beast and I shall look forward to hoovering up some stray photons once I can get it mounted and balanced in my obs.

Just looking around and the light curve from https://www.aavso.org/vsots_alphaori and there seems to be quite regular dips down to around 1.5 and a more exception dip to almost 2 in 1948 ish.

Very unlikely, but It would be quite special to see such a close SN in our lifetime - it would also be sad to loose an old friend of some 50+ years in my case. Quite a good article at Sky and Telescope from new years eve, but the light curve they plot for the last 50 years. If we're fitting 1.66 now it is hitting an exceptional low.

HI Paul, Many thanks for finding and posting this - wonderful to see the original specification and pricing. Over £ 4,000 pounds in today's money...

Now that is a thing of beauty and very good provenance.

It does smack of quality, the mirror looks to be 2.5" thick! I've never seen a mount quite like that, but I do like the double D lines..... slightly reminiscent of the robot in 'Forbidden Planet'

No connection to the seller, but this looks really interesting, with a very heavy and unusual looking EQ mount. I would guess it's early 70's, but would love to know some info on this. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/184162508130 Sadly I don't have the time or space for another project, but hope this finds a good home.

I love that, a most well deserved AAPOD and hopefully more to follow.

Excellent point Rusted - I have a lot of assorted cast iron weights of various makes and colours and will invest in some white smooth hamerite and a few cheap brushes

Thanks Ben - amazing condition given 20 years exposure to British weather. I'm sure that 20 years will see me through. Interesting that the street light, a traditional bane of UK astronomers, can prove to be such a useful tool. In my area we changed over to LED some 4-5 years ago, I expect the contractors will have scrimped on fittings, but will take a closer look now!

It certainly would look awesome, but a fair amount of polishing to keep it gleaming - would look great for that cyber punk effect (like the Great Weatherall Refractor below) and a little denser than SS, but also fair bit more expensive to buy. The stainless surfaces up nicely with Carbide tooling on my lathe and no problems so far with drilling, boring and tapping ops - though I did use the feed and suds pump for the finishing cuts.

Hi James, and thanks for your response - I do still dip in and follow the forum and progress on your obs, but have been busy with my daughter and very little time and energy for astronomy. I have managed to sort my bijou 8x8' workshop and trying to get my new planetary setup running. My rig is quite unweildy, with an OO 14" swinging on old style CGE Pro, within a 2.2m pulsar dome. To shift the OTA CoB forward sufficiently to operate in the dome, I had to add almost 5kg of lead flashing wrapped around the front of the OTA. This is held in steel rings between two 14" losmandy dovetails. All up with camera, ADC and Barlow's, just under 30kg. I'm hoping the OO ultra grade optics, smaller CO and open tube will give the C14's a run for the money and have a couple of years yet to tweak before Jupiter, Mars and Saturn become decent UK targets. Certainly not expecting this to perform for LX imaging, but with CMOS sensitivity improving, exposure rates commonly over 100fps at f15-f20 and the rig reasonably sheltered from the wind, it should be stable enough.

316 is good, but much more expensive and harder to machine, though a few inserts or taking lighter cuts makes little real difference to me at home. Cold galvanise, paint or electro plate all good enough for me, but it would be nice to do stainless if I could find a bit.

I managed to source some 32mm diameter 304 grade SS at a sensible price for another project, but have enough left to make an extended counterweight shaft for my cge pro. Looks great and machines nicely - pretty sure it will do the job and stay shiny in my obs, but just wanted a second opinion. The original is 15.5" X 1.25" including turned down externally threaded end at 1" X 16tpi but thinking I might add 7-8" and reduce the number of weights (currently 25kg, original Celestron 10kg, 2 X SW 5kg and 2 X 2.5 iron gym weights). (BTW - I'm still looking for some cheap/free 8" SS billet bar - about 10" should suffice and a powered hacksaw/ bandsaw.... )

There's a v3 synscan controller on Astroboot at the moment £ 77.50 less 10% (Snow Sale Still On!) - http://www.astroboot.co.uk/AstroBoot

I will definitely run in some fibre when I pull in the permanent power feed, so this will be an option. I shall have a dig around re other RPi like boards, but nothing cheaper than what you already have and quite happy to run my laptop headless, with control back in the house - It might even be easier to run this with a remote KVM extender and I can switch this with my home desktop inside in the warm!

Thanks Gina - I would love to do this and probably makes a lots of sense for deepsky, but I don't think the Pi3 would provide enough grunt (USB3 connectivity or the i/o to SSD) for high speed planetary imaging. However I could run all of this on Linux on the laptop and firecapture will run natively on Linux (limited support for cameras, but does cover the ZWO/QHY). I will have a read through your blogg as I do have an idle RP3+ available and was thinking of using this to control my dome.

Thanks Dave - I didn't realise the source code was available for this - I might just have a pop at this as the focuser works beautifully and it's far more satisfying to DIY it (rather than forking out £300+ to Baader/Moonlight/FT).

It does and the AAF2 is working fine, but Firecapture x64 won't play with it and gives an error about non compliant 32 bit drivers! I'll try and screenshot the error tonight, but I still have the option of using AAF2 as a separate program or going back to x86 version of FC, so not a show stopper but wanted to check. To be honest I'm not sure if there is any real advantage in using the x64 version of firecapture, as USB3 and i/o to SSD are probably the main bottlenecks affecting frame rates at larger ROI's.

@tekkydave - Dave does your 2.5 version include an x64 bit driver? I upgraded my version of Firecapture to try the x64, but it doesn't play with the original ascom driver. Not the end of the world as I can still use the AAF2 software to control the focusing outside of FC. I've been using the original version of this project for the last four years, but will update and build a new version now for new monster planetary setup!

I'd be all up for the foxes, or badgers, hedgehogs (pretty much anything other than rats or a big wasp/hornet nest that closed the observatory. However, having kept chickens briefly on multiple occasions, I totally understand James taking sensible precautions to dissuade the foxes

I'm pretty sure that any of the waterproof foaming gap filling adhesives would do a good job with concrete block, as it's such a large and pourous area to join (gorilla glue?). Otherwise a tube of masonry/fixing epoxy resin should give a bomb proof bond. I've bolted my piers down on 16mm rebar - galvanised as I'm sure this will still outlive me! When I moved out of the last house I bolted the roll off roof down, took away the runners, removed the pier and ground the bolts off with an angle grinder. The shed conversion took 2-3 hours, or about 1/50th of the observatory build time and the new owner was very pleased with the posh shed!

Glad to see you are finally getting around to this build, it has been a long time a coming. Quite a challenging site for a build, but will be good to have a raised deck/base as the floor, which should keep you and the equipment safe from any flood waters. I'm sure that West Country builders built the shed square and the dry stone wall is still standing, so blaming camera distortion. Are you rolling the roof off uphill towards the house, or going for extra long legs on the downhill end and does this affect the warm room? Hope you get the time and weather to enjoy the build and some clear skies this autumn and winter to sit back and enjoy the views.

Look forward to seeing this and probably will have a look at the Nema17's too! Worth saying I struggled with 28byj-48 steppers, which was not quite enough to move the OC2 focuser, FW, Barlow and Cam on my OO newt (via 10-30 MX belt reduction). However, earlier in the thread someone pointed to a 12v version of this motor which has worked brilliantly (even working supporting my DSLR and coma corrector). Though, if you are directly connecting to the focuser shaft a more powerful stepper like the NEMA17's is needed.

Nice job Gina and thanks for posting the pricing (if only this was available for my office on the IOW). Hope they have you up and running in short order!