Hawksmoor
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Beautiful night. Been out with bins and my 66mm Altair refractor. Not really dark this time of the year but warm as far as 2:00 in the morning goes in East Anglia. The Milky Way through Cygnus is a pretty thing and the view through 11x80 bins is breath taking. Hopefully I will have captured some widefield snaps in and around Sadr.
Hope the skies are clear for you wherever you are.
Night all you Stargazers.
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Amazing how many clouds can mysteriously appear out of a clear blue sky at the mere sniff of an eclipse!
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Nice to view tonight Antares and the claws of the scorpion just above my southern horizon as seen from our backyard. Had a fledgling robin fly in through the open bedroom window. Bird now safely back with mum and dad in our garden. All's well that ends well!
Nighty night stargazers.
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Mrs H planted out the petunias this week. Gales have since battered the east coast. It's no Midsummer Nights Dream in our backyard right now! The LVST yagi aerial is blowin' in the wind, the aerial is blowin' in the wind.
Night all from Lowestoft too close the sea.
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Welcome to SGL from George in Lowestoft.
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Purchased Ken Harrison's book 'Astronomical Spectroscopy for Amateurs'. It arrived this week and I have started to read through. Packed with useful information and straight forward explanations! Have also managed to get my new laptop to run VSpec - (cunningly by reloading Fritz Chessbase. VSpec must use some shared file - not sure why or how but it now works). Will review whether to buy RSpec after I've messed about with VSpec for a while. Have yet to master adjusting for Instrument Response using VSpec it is relatively simple using the trial RSpec software. Noticed Ken's book has a section on achieving this with VSpec, plus I have the relevant sections of the VSpec manual downloaded. Early this morning whilst I was trying out my homemade widefield astrograph, I noticed Vega was rising in the east so will soon be available for spectrometer calibration. -Yay!
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I am a hoarder so never throw away stuff that might come in useful. Being a tad environmental I try to re-purpose, re-engineer and re-use old kit that I purchased back in the day when I was gainfully employed. My old pre digital SLR lenses were first connected to my DSLR with a shiny new adaptor but then fell into disuse when I realised my EOS lenses performed better. Now retired, with more time and reduced cashflow, I decided that rather than modding my DSLR, if I could attach my old lenses to my QHY5L-ii mono and colour cameras, I had the makings of a wide-field camera that would b
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The weather is not good but the promised 'sleet' has not yet materialised. -BUT- I have had a wonderful day maintaining and reorganising my astro and photographic kit. Best of all I managed to acquire new pre-sectioned inserts for my airline storage cases and have spent a happy afternoon making nests for 'my stuff'. I love that moment when the foam detaches and it makes a lovely scrunching sound. Old men are easily pleased! Mrs H just rolls her eyes upward to the heavens.
I shall await a warmer day for sorting out my equatorial mount on it's pier in the backyard.
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Very low resolution spectroscopy using stuff I have in my shed
Hawksmoor posted a blog entry in Blog 19648
This has been a long time in gestation - first I built the 3d printer from a kit my son gave me for Christmas 2018, then I had to pluck up the courage to turn it on. The whirring and flashing lights are all a bit much for a man more accustomed to using Crayola 'chubby' crayons than digital vernier calipers. Then I had to get my head round Sketch-Up, Netfabb, Repetier Host , Slicer3 and how to stop molten filament from blocking up a very small hole in a very hot bit of metal. In my shed I have some 500lines/mm holographic film and a QHY5L-ii mono camera and three telescopes of varying fo -
Finally got my 3d. Printer to print. Yay!
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Hi Grant. Printing wise, nothing startlingly complex as I'm new to the 3d printing process. My son gave me a GeeeTech PRUSA I3 kit for Christmas a couple of years ago and I finally got around to building it and getting it working this year. I've just made a slide holder for a 500lines/mm diffraction transmission grating to fit between my mono QHY 5-11 camera and the extension tube. Seemed like the easiest way of making a low resolution spectrometer with stuff I had to hand. I wanted to try out the grating in a converging beam (after the objective lens) and keeping all of the first order spectrum on the chip meant that the grating had to be close to it. This design was easy to make and in no way compromised the camera.
If this works, many of my little projects don't, I will post an image or two.
I'm glad you've got your team of printers well trained. I'm still in the 'taming business'. There are so many ways to mess up a print and I seem to have found most of them.
Nice to hear from you.
Regards from George next the Sea.
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Nice night until the fog rolled up. Mars below the Pleiades very photogenic, so took a few snaps with a tripod mounted DSLR. 1sec exposures at ISO6400 and f=55mm. Lovely full Moon over my hedge.The night sky from a semi rural location is a very beautiful thing!
Night night Stargazers.
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Hi Reggie
Really nice images. Stars and planet nice and sharp! A real pretty event. Mars continues to please the eye. Hope the string of beautiful nights continues for you.
Weather here on the UK east coast remains volatile. Early this evening it started off well. No cloud and fairly stable. Sirius, which is low on the southern horizon at my latitude, was not 'twinkling' which generally signals a good night for imaging. I did notice a hint of cloud east over the sea and sadly within an hour this had moved on shore and astronomy was off for the night. I need to move to a desert at altitude!
Best regards George
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