Rusted

The black "octopus" is actually a soap dish to go on the vertical shower rail. I'll go with a Mak, too.

Excellent images! As always.

As in not real?

The original was turquoise until I recoloured it.

29.5.19 Bit of a bonfire. Still experimenting. Cloud most of the morning. Cleared to milky sky. 10% of 500 frames. ZWO 120 MC PST Stage XYZ 150/8 = 120/10 equivalent. Artistic embellishment in PhotoFiltre7.

Here's one for the oldies: Only a day late: A [solar] roundtoit?

You can take an old horse to the prom but you can't make him drink. Solar Twirleys 'R' us.

A superb, complex prom at 10.00 on the limb. Can't see anything on the disk. First chance for ages with cloud most days. Or too busy to take advantage of better weather. It was rather cloudy for most of today. 5pm before I set up. Well worth a look if you have H-a on tap. A few small proms scattered about but nothing to write home about.

Well, at least you didn't have to build upwards just to be able to see the sky.

Why not roll off onto the lawn parallel with the fence? I'd also suggest enough clearance behind the obs. to reach in for litter, maintenance or painting. Or, make it so close it won't matter but without using the fence for structure. Putting the obs. so near to the gap beside your house will force some odd manoeuvres with lengthy or bulky objects. Nor do you want to build so high that you block the light to your neighbour's window. If they normally have that window open they will be able to hear every sound you make or your mounting slewing. Or vice versa! External visibility will be high in your present situation through the diagonal gap to more distant homes. If south is across the rear face of your home then the further away you move the more western sky you will reach. I would be moving further down the garden for several of the reasons I have mentioned.

True. It never bothered us last time.. apart from the odd, spilt cup of tea.. which we put down to gravitational waves.. but were pooh-poohed.

I'm a martyr to solar haloes since my wife fitted net curtains to the observatory. Stop sniggering at the back! Seriously though.. how else can you keep curious swallows out? They come in for a quick orbit then back out again. 🙄 I keep a fly swat handy in case they decide to nest but I think they just like the big spiders. Plays havoc with my solar imaging! Brings a whole new meaning to "a bird in The Sun!" Suit yourselves.

Wonderfully well! Almost effortless because no wet lifting is involved. Improved mix from the rake tines reaching right to the bottom of the dry, then wet ingredients. After half a century of using a spade and making a mess on the ground I felt liberated. The mix is always contained and ready to be transported around the site without further lifting, loading or mess. No more dragging heavy and sloppy buckets around and then having several items to clean including your clothes and Wellies. No more judging how much water to add into a fragile crater ready to burst its contents across the patio or lawn. Add a little water at a time and just keep on mixing. Ideal for post holes. I am only charging £100 for a single [one day only] license for private users of the idea.

A wheelbarrow and a rake never did me any harm when it came to mixing concrete.

Hi Lars, It is a poor engineering design which is trying to bend the tines of a rigid fork inwards to achieve enough friction. Your idea of increasing friction with alternative materials seems very sensible. Plastic would tend to compress under load. So metal shims [spacing washers] make better sense. The less the tines have to bend inwards the larger will be the friction area. Harder shims [washers] and a close fit will reduce the tines being forced inwards when tightened. There is the risk of causing damage by forcing the tines apart while trying to get metal shims in. They need to fit well rather than spreading the fork tines apart. So the thickness of the shims is quite critical. Similar metals have higher friction when rubbed together. So aluminium might be a good choice for the spacing washers.

Hi, I have come up against a serious hurdle in SharpCap with my solar imaging. The sun's image in the viewing pane is overlaid with a weird "rippled glass" texture. This does not rotate with the camera nor move with the displayed field of view. Hopefully that eliminates camera, filter or equipment damage. The "ripple" [or coarse grain] is visible in both H-a and white light. The "ripple" is captured along with the video. So the resulting videos are completely useless for stacking. The similarity to solar surface texture is uncanny. Sheer coincidence? The screen shows no sign of damage on any other material. Only in SharpCap and only in the live viewing pane. I tried every setting and adjustment in SC but it made no difference. I have attached a snap I took of the laptop screen. Any constructive thoughts, please? Thanks

I'm glad you have the knowledge and skill to use UT. Though isn't that a bit like relying on the Equation of Time to fix lunch time?

Fortunately the sun finally came out to give me a real sky target. C-Du-C badly overshot on a Goto slew to the Sun after clicking on it. So I reduced UT by two hours in AWR as it was showing local time. Which immediately made the Sun's coordinates wrong in AWR. Syncing on the sun in C-Du-C, with the telescope manually pointed to the Sun, solved that problem. I now have matching LST and the correct coordinates. Now I'll see if if it can find the parking spot and then slew back to the sun. Success on both counts! Happy days are here again.. tra-la-la-la!

Lottery funding?

Hi, This is driving me around the Polar Axis! I usually use C-Du-C with ASCOM[AWR] to control my big, home made GEM. But slews are going horribly awry. My slews overshot by miles every time! My AWR IH2 handset is showing LST two hours ahead compared to all of the LST calculators I can find online. [Four so far and counting.] Meanwhile, AWR alone on the IH2, is fine on slews until I connect the computer and open C-Du-C. AWR is showing the correct time in RTC. As is C-Du_C and all the online calculators. BUT!! C-Du-C is showing my easterly observatory site as + instead of -. Is this the problem? Or simply a display error? I'm on the other side of the North Sea from Gravely Blighted but C-Du-C shows a + whether I enter East or West for longitude! I should be able to rest the C-Du-C cursor on the Southern horizon [Local meridian] to obtain LST directly. However, C-Du-C insists on showing LST 2 hours behind AWR's. Help, pretty please?

I am not seeing a picture of this miscreant set-up. What about a hex-socket head bolt/screw? [Allen screw in UK colloquial.] One can obtain socket head grub screws too.

That which one would otherwise avoid were one not recompensed in kind, in keep, in rations or in tokens to the local, monopoly food store.

👀

Least of all those in the colonies.