Rusted

Another day and some fine proms are still there on the eastern limb. Full sun here today. So there is no excuse not to capture some images. Still experimenting with software and settings.

I would hesitate to build a pipe mount if it relies on standard tapered threads for bearings. By their very nature two tapers can only ever be slop-free in one situation. That is when they are screwed tightly together! I would urge you to consider making a plywood [offset] fork for your lovely [longer] refractor. Extend the baseboard forwards of the bearing area to carry a counterweight to balance the weight of the OTA. Lead weights, lead sheet from the church roof the builder's merchant or a lump of scrap metal. Anything stable will do. This used to be known as a Richard Berry Offset Fork Mounting because he popularized them rather than inventing them. An image search will turn up lots of examples. These mountings rely on buttery smooth PTFE/Teflon against PVC pipe trunnions and PTFE/Formica base bearings. The side [altitude] bearings are fitted to plywood boards attached to spaced, telescope tube rings. Much like a Dobsonian reflector but raised on a pier or tripod so you can reach the eyepiece without kneeling. A star diagonal helps here but don't make your tripod or pier too low. If you need a stronger equatorial then consider a vintage mounting which are often cheap but stable. All this assumes that your own mounting can't handle the greater moment of a longer OTA. It can quickly get expensive if you try to go up in steps until you find a suitable commercial mounting.

The major prom is still dispersing: And I owe it all to Peter and all the other H-a "nuts" for sharing their cumulative discoveries.

And a third image of the same prom showing how quickly things can change in only half an hour. This is the same set-up but capturing the prom and disk detail at the same time. Though the disk was washed out by subsequent brightening to ring out the prom. 6" f/8 + D-ERF + PST + ZWO120MC x 2 WO + SharpCap + PhotoFiltre7.

Tried a 2x WO Barlow with improved results: Needs more work on the disk.

A real struggle teasing out enough contrast.

What incredible detail you have set in granite! I must try to copy your methods.

I used to store my four refractors upright on their dewshields in the same shed where I have my various powered saws. The gap around the old Vixen focusers went completely unnoticed. That is, until I found my refractors almost opaque to any light after a few months. That was mostly astro inactivity and a considerable excess of sawing on the obs. build. I kept a loose poly bag over each OTA focuser after a good clean out. Makes me wonder how much sawdust went down my lungs! Cough! Spit! Ting!!

The [destructive] power of the wind rises as the cube of velocity and is often extremely localized. The danger is when the wind can enter a building and inflate its surfaces to destruction. Suction on corners and flat roof surfaces is often very damaging. A double garage roof, made of hefty, old fashioned, corrugated steel, unpeeled, lifted and flew hundreds of yards over the intervening houses [including ours] and lots of 40' tall trees before landing in a tight roll in the field behind us. It had rolled against the corrugations! Not with them! We only lost a quarter of our roof while the farm behind us was almost ripped to pieces when the wind got inside the giant ports of the attached barns on either side of the house. Wind speeds were about 35m/s or 70-75mph. IMO: A ROR ought to be held down with at least four angled turnbuckles into very serious eye-bolts through heavy timbers. The building ought to be bolted down to a heavy slab. Though I used lots of buried, pyramidal, concrete, carport anchors myself. Cladding it in plywood using decent screws all over the framework will provide serious triangulation against building distortion and gaps opening up. Ship-lap and T&G boards with corner braces do NOT provide the same degree of geometric stiffening as sturdy sheet materials. Though they can be easily added on top of the plywood if the appearance of boards appeals. Fortunately I have access to decoratively grooved 4x8 plywood in 9 & 12mm thickness which I used [in 12mm] throughout my two story building, using hundreds of stainless steel screws into the 2x4 and 2x6 framework. My shed next door using this technique and the same materials has survived unpainted for two decades. Both buildings entirely DIY, working alone. I used fierce, double sided, galvanized, bulldog, truss jointing 'washers' on all the joints of the shed. Screwfix sells them, amongst others. The dome has shown no signs of lifting in any wind so far. It has eight restraints on the base ring to stop it lifting. The Welsh coast was a ten year battle against the wind while I still lived there. I doubt much has changed.

Thanks for the suggestion. A hair drier might be cheaper, save electricity bills and need only used when necessary.

It's not enough to try and keep a closed space dry. The metal parts are subject to thermal inertia. Which means masses of condensation every time the temperature rises quickly and the metal lags behind. The same holds true with thick glass in an OTA of course. My refractor objectives get misted up inside after a cold night when I open up early to the warm sunshine. Even though I cover them with protective saucepan lids overnight they don't offer any "insulation."

Great post, MKHACHFE! But M29 has an excess of super-cooled MEH? Why was there nothing in the papers!

Nice prom. Sham about the filter! I make my 90mm refractor, Solar foil filters from cut down, strong plastic, bleach bottles. Which are always a tight fit on the dewshield and almost reach the objective for extra security. Mind you. I have forgotten to cap the 9x50 finder before now. Even tried to use it briefly. So I removed it completely. I should have made a Solar foil filter for that too. So it could be used.

For magnification purposes, the Binoviewer usually adds about 100mm, or slightly more to the focal length due to its glass path length. Which it promptly steals from the usual focal point. Assuming you can reach inward focus, without sawing lumps off the main tube or adding a Barlow, then you are very lucky. I only rarely use anything shorter than 20mm on my 150/1200 and 180/2160 refractors with the binoviewer. A 2x WO Barlow works wonders with 26mm & 32mm EPs. Which means 13 & 16mm equivalent EPs without a Barlow but I can still reach focus. So about the same magnification as your 15mm. The resulting magnifications are fine on the Sun and Moon and I find the longer eye relief, of "longer" EPs, offers much greater comfort when using the binoviewer.

Imagine their relief when they discover it only contains a nocturnal hobbyist with [very] strange habits.

For Lunar and Solar I wouldn't be without my [dealer replaced] TS binoviewers. The first was badly misaligned. The absence of floaters and relaxed viewing is like flying over the surface rather than staring through a narrow pipe at it. I use a WO 2x Barlow [much better than TS GPCs] and secondhand pairs of Meade 4000 EPs. Mostly 32, 26 & 20mm. The 40mm aren't so binov friendly IME due to excessive eye relief and very small field of view. The Sun in H-alpha shows even texture right across the disk in the binoviewers while providing suitably high powers. It requires a conscious effort with a single EP to see any detail [at all] in the center of the sun in H-a. I was afraid of these high powers before experience proved it was easily possible. Thank you, St. Peter. Proms are much more fun and intricately detailed in the binoviewer. Mere secondary artifacts with one eye. Every detail is laid bare in the binoviewer. I'm too far north to see any planets from here. A decent focuser and sturdy mounting are essential for binoviewing. My big Feather Touch made it a real pleasure. My previous 2" focuser always wanted to hurl the binoviewers down the observatory ladder and spit on their grave!

Nicely done Francis! Love those joints!

At the risk of starting an endless argument: Modern piping is often plastic. Rural homes are almost certainly fed by miles of plastic hose. Connecting the indoor metal pipes, if any, as an earth, will be lethal and based on a lack of basic electrical knowledge. Discussions on forums, which have US members, suggests that the rules for earthing are as varied as the soils on which the building stands. I claim absolutely zero knowledge and nobody should ever follow anything suggested on a forum. Your "expert" advisor might be a trolling, psychopathic, serial killer! ALWAYS seek EXPERT advice from a local, fully qualified electrician with experience of your local conditions. Your having moved on from your own installation leaves those who follow on in a very precarious position. Which through their own ignorance, of what they only think they should trust, might easily kill them. This doesn't even begin to deal with the matter of lightning and adding extra earthing rods to an existing electrical system.

Around here earth spikes are minimum of 2m or 2.2m long. Galvanized or copper coated. There are several ways of getting them down into the ground: Manual hammering. Needs a stepladder and a helper to hold the spike straight. Hammering with a contractors large hammer drill and hollow driver socket. Keep adding water around the spike as you bang it in. It is supposed to run down around the spike. Using water pressure from a hose to a long pipe to make the hole and replace the pipe with the spike. I used two lump hammers followed by a sledge hammer as the resistance increased. Clay soil and no rocks until nearly full depth @ 2.2m. I was lucky and only hit a rock at full depth. You couldn't get a 6" nail in where I once lived in Wales on an ice age moraine. The local board replaced an old and wimpy pole transformer for us while we were there. The earths for that were several, absolutely massive, stranded cables spread out on the field and buried for probably 50 yards each. A serious cable clamp on top of a domestic earth spike, under a protective cap, ensures a long life connection. The job is strictly for an authorized electrician over here. As is all outside electrical work and most inside. I did the job while they were here, fitting new sockets indoors. The sparks watched happily as I hammered the spike in for over half an hour. Then nodded through my 2.5mmm earth cable connection to a single row of 3-Pin sockets indoors for my UK Hifi. Hum gone!

Retirement needs careful planning to avoid sloth, bad habits, weight gain and boredom. Fulfilling hobbies, regular fresh experiences, a sound diet and plenty of exercise are vital to continued sanity and good health. IMHO. "Use it or lose it" has more than a smidgen of underlying truth. Learn or try something new every single day. Every year seems shorter than the last. So make every minute count in your favour. Cycling and walking, particularly in quiet green surroundings, bring balance without much financial investment. Both burn empty calories from today's poor food & beverage choices. Exercise tunes your overall balance and general fitness. You can't afford to smoke nor drink [much] and both are targets for constant price increases and increased risk of ill health. Add up the ways that you can multiply your gains from every, low cost activity: Increased physical fitness, social and mental well being. Walk or cycle to the shops and carry the stuff home in suitable cloth bags, a saddle bag or a rucksack: Provides: Physical exercise, sharpened reactions, memory exercises, money saving, lowered blood pressure, a social life if you smile often enough and fresh experiences. Make several journeys a week. Or every day, if need be and do avoid main roads. The car needs its rest far more than you do now. Swimming? Bowls? Golf? Metal detecting? Photography? Map reading? Exploring canal footpaths? Researching local history? Voluntary work? The library can save considerable expense on hard back books and magazines for research and hobbies. Charity shops for cheap but quality clothing if you're "picky." Above all, avoid online forums where ye olde pedants offer free advice and therapy for fellow, Traveling Twirleys! Enjoy? If you can.

Glue some fine sandpaper or fine emery paper to a flat piece of plywood or thick piece of glass. Then smooth and flatten the surfaces using short strokes.

James, you're doing it all wrong! You do the swimming and let SuperGirl build the observatory. You know it makes sense.

It's not all about stability so much as avoiding nasty hurdles in the dark. I welded up some truly massive piers but always regretted the "sticky out" bits down near the ground. 🤕 And, that was before I fitted ever-larger wheels to try and make them portable. [Oxen permitting.]

Would it be uncharitable to suggest that you might have shared your excess of rain with us during last year's severe drought? ⛈️ While we do admire your unbounded generosity, on this occasion.. it's really all about the timing, you know.

With cables and plugs being constantly "updated" it might be safer to dig a tunnel. Then you can crawl [or walk through] and just clip the new Cat 19.9 and USB 23+ cables into trunking on the walls as you go. It makes my tatty old, mains extension cable feel so inadequate. Is it an age thing?