Tomatobro

Spock to Kirk. "its art Jim but not as we know it"

A photo of a fossilised bone sticking out of a shale rock on Mars? Now that would be something worth a "special report"

latest download shows no signs of SID's. What was freaky was that my logger software got fed up of recording and graphing in 12 hour periods and decided all by itself that 24 hour periods would be better. I have no idea how its done that. Perhaps the LGM's got fed up of signalling me and decided to mess with the software to try and get my attention. Its on the bench under test and is working normally at the moment............

Not sure what a mount hub pro is but I have built several stepper motor focuser's using the Hitec Astro focus controller. From memory the only thing to watch out for is that the Hitec unit requires a six wire stepper motor. I purchased some bargain listed motors that had a six pin connector but when checked they were internally four pin. If you are skilled at electronics it is possible to build a driver interface to adapt four pin motors but that requires additional hardware and software. Just looked up the Hitec Mount Hub pro and it may work with four pin stepper motors but its not clear in the text if that is the case. Looks to have the same internals as the HT focus unit so must be six wire (unipolar)

setting aside portability by the time you add the costs of the SWA pro and the Williams mount together you are into the range of the SW go to mounts of similar capacity so keep that in mind. The delivery issues are just the same whichever one you go for. One other tip for the SWA pro. Its very easy to knock the rotary switch from the "off" to "on" and if you use batteries they will be dead flat if left in storage like this. I always pull one AA cell out of the holder to prevent this

The supply chain of components has been badly affected by events and the fact that hobbies have seen an upsurge in take up the supply pipeline is just not being filled quick enough to meet demand. I have a star adventurer and its difficult to see where it could be improved. I got the Williams optics mount to speed up polar alignment but the one supplied works ok. I did add a simple degree wheel to the other end of the Dec adjustment knob as one complete turn equals 3 degrees of movement and made up a LED indicator that blinked after 20 seconds. Holding the RA buttons down for twenty seconds moves one degree. These changes made finding an object easier from a bright star. Final positioning is done via plate solving.

glad to help. I will start logging again from midnight tonight. When I started logging at midnight the signal monitor suggested that the transmitter was still down.

This is my guess at last weeks events Nothing unusual until the 27th when after the 8 am down time the signal was much stronger. Notice the flat top to the graph during the night Strong signal continued on the 28th but transmitter went offline at around 17:30. Normal night time graph profile On the 31st the transmitter went very erractic around 05:00 and went offline 05:20. Its been offline ever since (well up to 20:00 on the 1st of Sept) The signal never goes to zero, there is always noise present even when the transmitter is off

I think the numeric value of that web address is greater than the number of atoms in the entire universe Nice wine this......

I will download my data tomorrow and let you know....

Long baseline inter photography.....sounds good

Re the Muon detector I see that a USA source has the plastic blocks listed on Ebay......

The Velcro adhesive will not pull the paint off the scope but I find that except for the very lightest of installations its not the best when coupling round to flat objects. its also prone to creep over time if there is a cable load tugging all the time. The flat aluminium plate mounting works best long term. 3M do a tape called VHB. a half inch square on each corner of (say) a USB hub stuck to a flat surface and its there for life. The tape is not cheap but its the best.

The BAA have just published the July SID report, with small signal variations seen on the 4th and 8th of July. Frequencies monitored were 19.6 khz and 22.1 khz. Other than that its been a quite month. My data for the last 7 days show nothing special.

The idea of heating the ring is to take advantage of the aluminium expansion between the two effective diameters, If it were on my bench the first thing I would do is to remove the focuser from the scope. Then buy an aerosol of Freezer spray, the sort that is used for PCB electrical fault finding (sometimes freezing a bad transistor can make it spring into life). get set up and heat the adapter, then spray the freezer onto the inner ring and then quickly see if it will budge. It might be worth just spraying the inner ring and chilling it down and see if it will budge first before warming it up. The freezer spray is about £8 or so. Its er been a while since I purchased a can of this spray and its a bit more than £8. Screwfix do a pipe freezer spay but its £24 a can

The BAA have not published their July SID report yet but await it with interest. My understanding is that we see a sudden change in signal followed by a slow recovery as the ionosphere rebuilds its reflective layer. Similar to around 15:00 on the 18th in the above graph. All the graphs of SID's I have seen show a positive rise in the signal which I assume is what we see at dawn and dusk as the ground and sky phases change but to be honest I am just guessing at this point. The June BAA report says that non of the stations saw a SID.

I use this just method on my alt az, dob and binocular mounts and they are easy to use and accurate. You will find them a joy to use. The only thing I found was that my inclinometer was way to bright to maintain night vision so a red piece of plastic was used to dim the backlight. A Quality Street sweet wrapper works well

I don't use controllers. Experience tells me when dewing is likely and mostly its left plugged in but if the risk is low I just unplug

This is a personal view but I hate spending the same money twice. An Astrozap heated extended dew shield from Flo will work first time and every time. Yes its double the cost but it has a zero risk attached. The corrector on the front of the Mak is very prone to dewing so the alternative might but there again might not be enough for extended viewing sessions.

its volts times amps = watts volts divided by resistance = amps Dew controllers work on a Pulsed Width Modulation system (PWM) so the amount of heat generated is governed by the ratio of the on and off time.

The required settings for effective dew control will only come with experience and prevailing conditions. 4 watts on the guide scope will not affect its performance and 2.2 watts spread over the area of the 150PDS tube is unlikely to be noticed. Try them at full power at first and reduce the power if dewing is unlikely. Low power settings will extend the battery discharge time if you are using a battery.

will post my data just after noon today Usual washing machine interference on the 15th, unusual pattern during the night of the 17th. Looks like the LGM's are trying a different time to get my attention (spike just after 12:00 on the 17th)

I will stop mine early and download the data to see if I see the same numbers in the data

My original design was based on starting the recording at a precise time (say 12:00:00) and the software takes 10 readings over 29 seconds and then averages them. It then waits for a pulse from a timer (at 30 second intervals) to write the data to memory. The idea being that the exact timing of each data point could be inferred from its memory position i.e. data point 120 is one hour (13:00:00) from the start point. I added an external port so that I could connect a digital counter so I could see if the time from a radio controlled clock tallied with the count number from my own internal timer. With this setup, even after careful calibration of my clock timing loop errors crept in over 11 days of stand alone data logging. If the power fails then on startup the processor reads the first memory location and if its non zero then reads through the memory till it finds the first blank (actually the number is 255 not zero) and then starts recording from that memory address. It switches on a blue led to warn me that the receiver shut down and restarted so the timing will not tally. You can see a blue faced radio controlled clock in the picture and I hit on the idea of having a radio controlled clock module rotate a double ended beam breaker connected to the seconds hand which passed through an opto switch. The double ended beam breaker guaranteed 30 second pulse spacings with 100% accuracy (or so I thought!) I connected up my digital counter and set it running. After a few days I calculated the timings from the counter and found to my surprise that a discrepancy of exactly 10 minutes had occurred. A reset and run showed the same loss of time over 24 hours. What happens is in the early hours of the morning the radio clock stops and recalibrates its time from the radio signal. I then did a similar test with a modified battery clock module and found that this unit looses no more than 2 seconds over 7 days. The opto switch is mounted on an arm that allows me to calibrate the start time with the bench clock and to advance or retard a second or so during the 11 days of data logging. Also maintains time if the main power goes off Crude but as it turned out very effective.

latest data. That short pulse still appears at about the same time but its origins are unkown. There are some very short loss of signal events. The receiver loss of power alarm was not triggered so these are caused by the transmitter going off line The graphs are displayed in reverse chronological order (last is first)