Stub Mandrel

I was able to fill the bottom sections. I epoxies the plugs in place to stop leaks. The only way I could think of doing for the top parts was to plug them with plaster, but I decided not to bother. In the end I used aluminium welding sticks to really get the legs solid

Yes, quite a lot, otherwise the upper and lower legs are only secured together at the bottom and the do flap in the wind.

I did this to my EQ3 tripod before replacing it with a stainless steel EQ5 one. You could just fit big jubilee clips round the same part of each leg and do them up nice and tight.

Chjanging teh rules again! Who said you had to be in a field when you took the pics?

There was a fair bit of water not draining from the tip of the lower end, but now I've used it with the base the water runs right off. I don't think I'll use the setting screws as it is quite sensitive, requiring about 2cc of water, and in its box it was happily running at about 1 tip a second which should keep up with a downpour. I can't bear the thought of sending this machine back. Worst case I will buy a Prusa kit and build it into a more rigid enclosure.

IIRC (it's at the top of a pole) my encoder is built into some sort of two-part cosmetics box with two round halves that screw together. I must get it down and have a look. Prototype water bucket works, but needs some sort of 'lip' or 'spout' to stop it holding back a couple of 'raindrops'. Any ideas on shapes?

You could cheat by using hue/saturation/lightness and shifting the magenta channel towards blue and repeating 2 or 3 time (this will have the effcet of reducing the red in the centre which is overwhelming the blue).

You may be interested in the quality of print from the Dremel. The bottom one is a 0.5 module gear so about 34mm across, it meshes well with a stock gear.

My gray code disc is printed on OHP acetate, but works by transmission rather than reflection.

About 0.1mm >oops!<

Oh dear. Printed the bucket part and the sides didn't come out at all - I made them too thin

My idea is to put it in a box with a mini-funnel on top, to go under a big (6") funnel. Need to add a movement detector, a blade for an opto switch, I think, glued to bottom of the bucket so it has a flat bottom!

Thin haze can make subs a LOT lighter looking through mine from last night the variation in individual subs is enormous even though I could barely see the difference by eye.

Great, thanks - the combination of calibration screws and where to put the pivot were what I needed - and 'tipping bucket'. Now give me an hour or two.

Thanks Gina, I just need an idea of dimensions and how to balance it!

My weather station has been on hold for about 10 years or more... I have the use of a Dremel 3040 printer I'm reviewing for another week or so. I might try a self-emptying rain cup. Any clues?

Just to say it was spot on last night; first time I've used it in anger since the update.

That's odd, the blue dust seems to be easy to capture and modded cameras don't make any difference to it?

You should be!

I think that was the OJ pallette. He had an ill-fitting glove stretched over the phone...

That granite mount looks good and solid.

Great crisp sharpness, but have you been a bit aggressive with the black point, it looks like you have clipped out loads of faint detail.?

It's clearly Venus... mostly armless...

I get hollow stars if I move the bottom slider too far to the right in DSS. If you look carefully at the graph the top of the curve bends down once the slider is past about 80%. This means if any star has a blown out core, it darkens! In this example it doesn't create the effect because the histogram is far to the left: The solution is simple, check a bright star before saving your DSS picture, and if tit is hollow, move the slider left a bit and try again. I'm sure this is related to how the bezier curve controls have been implemented as the top right of the curve should be fixed to the top right of the graph regardless of slider postions

Keep playing with the processing then, the detail of the first shouldn't stop you being able to tease out the colours from it by holding back the reds. I got good colours for the same target out of my modded 450D here: Do you have photoshop or gimp? If so you can use (1) as your LUM and belnd in some of (2) as RGB,