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Hawksmoor

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  1. Hawksmoor
    Capturing images of meteors is a bit like fishing. After the event, you are always haunted by the big one that got away!
    My widest camera lens is a Canon 18-55mm EFS zoom and even though this covers quite a bit of sky there is plenty left in which a bright meteor can suddenly appear.
    As I had two camera bodies, a Canon 600D and 400D DSLR, I decided to try and use them in tandem to improve my chances of capturing more meteors. Fabricating a ‘meteor rig’, reusing equipment and materials to hand, seemed to be an interesting project.
    I already had:
    Two Canon camera bodies One reasonably wide angle Canon camera lens An old Meade ETX tripod A  Star Adventurer Equatorial mount. A homemade connecting bar (for linking the Star Adventurer to the ETX tripod. A ball head connector for the Star Adventurer A  length of oak batten An inexpensive Chinese intervalometer Some large rubber bands A collection of stainless steel nuts bolts and washers What I needed to acquire:
    Another matching Canon 18-55mm EFS zoom lens. After surfing ‘the Bay’ I managed to find and purchase one in good condition for under £40 inc VAT and delivery. A mini ball head for mounting one of the camera bodies on the oak batten (the other camera was to be mounted directly) - £9 Another intervalometer - £13 A little bit of woodwork and trial and error allowed me to construct a meteor rig which allows each camera to point independently in RA and Alt but move together on an equatorial basis. I have had one trial run which managed to capture a bright sporadic meteor on both cameras. Interestingly, even though the camera settings were kept the same, the 600D and 400D images were slightly different (the 400D images were noisier).
    ‘Metcheck’ is predicting bad weather in Lowestoft for the night of Perseid maximum. Sorry, I guess it’s my entire fault!
     

  2. Hawksmoor
    Having read this article in the June edition of the Sky at Night magazine I became unusually fired up by the thought of a bit of DIY. After some preliminary rumaging around in B&Q and Maplins, I set about constructing a Yagi aerial under the cover of my car port. Tension mounted as the July edition of Sky at Night, containing part 2 of 'How to use radio signals to catch meteors', landed on our door mat. Following tricky negotiations with my partner, the long suffering Anita, I ordered the pricey bit, the FUNcube Dongle Pro +. I await the delivery of this latest bit of kit in high expectation.
    In the mean time I have completed and erected the aerial which now sways incongruously above the roof of my shed. Its been up two hours or more and as yet I have received no objections from my neighbours. I have decided, rather ostentatiously, to call my shed the Jodrell Plank Observatory and the completed installation the LVST (Lowestoft Very Small Telescope).
    Anita has not really stopped laughing since I erected the aerial, I'm not sure why but hey she is a girl!
    I'm rather hoping I can get this all to work otherwise I'm out of pocket to the tune of £200 and my wife, children and grandchildren will probably have me put in a home for eccentric old folk.

    :smiley:
  3. Hawksmoor

    'One of those'

    By Hawksmoor,

    After many a night of stretching pillow cases over the end of my telescope, no offence intended, I have finally got around to making myself a light-box for taking flats.  I can only hope this will improve my images.
    I gleaned most of the materials from the back of my shed, added a few LEDS and a switch from my best mate Mr Maplin and attached a bungee and batteries from everyone's favourite country 'Poundland'.  It doesn't look pretty but I cant wait to try it. Come on weather make an old man's evening just a little more cheery. I've almost used up the Scandinavian Noir series I recorded from the Telly.  If the I don't get a clear night soon I will be forced to watch tennis or football.

  4. Hawksmoor
    Late on February 10th and in the early hours vof the 11th, I tried out my newly purchased QHY5-11 camera.  Whilst awaiting the appearance of Jupiter over the hedge, I had my first go at 'guiding' using ther QHY5-11 as a guide camera and my Canon DSLR as an imaging camera.  All went surprisingly smoothly. Orion was loitering in the south-east and although the light pollution was not good ,  I targetted  Alnitak and all the usuaL culprits.  I chose a guide star, locked on and started a series of 3 minute exposures.  One was ruined by a passing satellite but after excluding this one, I managed thirty minutes  worth of photons without mishap.  Oh how my cup floweth over!  Then disaster, the guide star broke up before my very eyes and everything went 'pixels- up' on my clockwork laptop.  Trying not to panic, I saught reassurance by telling myself that the camera driver was probably playing up.  So I followed the set course used by computer experts worldwide. I turned everything off. Then turned it all back on.  As the camera booted up, I scanned the computer screen for stars. Completely black!!!!!!!  At this point I imagined the next morning's conversation with my long suffering wife.  " You only purchased the camera yesterday and you broke it on the same day"!  "What are you like @*$££££"?
    Then it dawned on me, the earth had been spinning and both Barnard 33 and my selected guide star had disappeared below the ridge tiles on the kitchen extension to our house.  No wonder PHD Guiding had struggled!  What a turnip?   I have to say this act of genius was not a one off. The week before I had stayed up to four in the morning taking video clips of Jupiter using my old QHY5v planetary camera. The following day whilst eating my breakfast I realised that I had forgotten to use the infra-red filter.  So if anyone wants several gigabytes of blurry videos of Jupiter, apply immediately to avoid disaapointment. I must be getting old!
    Anyway, the image of Alnitak, the Flame and Horsehead nebulae turned out better than I thought and I did get some useable AVIs of Jupiter.  The seeing was a bit poor so the Jupiter images are not that sharp, but all in all  I'm quite pleased with the QHY5-11.  I believe QHY are bringing out a new camera this year to replace the QHY5-11 so I purchased it at a very good knock-down price from Modern Astronomy.


  5. Hawksmoor
    For once a Bank Holiday turned out nice so enjoyed a ramble along the river and took a look at the Sun.
    http://george-artcabinedujardin.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/what-amateur-astronomers-do-in-daylight.html


  6. Hawksmoor
    I like a bit of recycling and so, after I realised that I had not used my old ETX90 RA for at least two years, I decided to get it out of its fabric carry-case and give it 'the once over'. I have to say that little scope is a robust little beggar and optically as sound as the day my partner Toot purchased it for my fiftieth birthday. The fork mount is definitely passed its sell by date but the OTA is definitely too good to waste sitting on a shelf in a bedroom.
    So today I decided to remove the OTA from the forks so that I could use the ETX on my recently acquired Star Adventurer equatorial mount or otherwise piggy-back on my 127mm.refractor. Being a bit cautious, I consulted the relevant pages of Mike Weasner's site and after a bit of a rumage around to find the right sized imperial allen key, I threw caution to the wind and set about separating the scope from the forks.  Once the four hex screws were removed it only required a bit of brute force to slide the two bits apart. 'Houston we have separation' and the jobs a good un!
    The next part I really enjoyed, a quick trip to Maplins to buy a flight case to house said OTA. I really like pulling out the precut sections of foam etc. However, I have relunctantly come to the conclusion that I have run out of items of furniture in our sitting room behind which I can  hide the now seven flight cases from Toot. I have also covered most of my backyard with sheds and if I put anymore stuff in the loft, I will inadvertently convert my house into a bungalow.
    I'm really pleased that I shall be using the ETX again. It will be good for imaging brighter comets and white light solar work.  Hopefully, I will be able to use it to watch the transit of Mercury.
    On a more positive note, less cash or space intensive, a piece of transmission diffraction grating film arrived mail order from Israel this morning. So next week on rainy days I will be working on my Mark2 DIY filter or the 'VCS'  (aka a very cheap spectrometer).  I made the COAA version using an Epson printer to print lines on acetate sheet and this works quite well  (image in one of my albums) but number of lines per millimetre limited by the printers operating parameters.  I have been reading Jeffrey L Hopkins 'Using Commercial Amateur Astronomical Spectrographs' published by Springer.  It is an excellent practical read on spectroscopy particularly suitable for someone like me.  I sit firmly on a spectral line somewhere between 'reasonably untechnical' and 'complete numpty'.

  8. Hawksmoor
    What a marvelous day for February. The thermometer in our back garden reached seventeen degrees Celsius this afternoon. A truly balmy day for the East Coast of Britain in winter.
    Whilst taking rubbish out to the dustbin I noticed that Jupiter, Venus and the new crescent moon were arranged in a line leading to the west where the sun had just set. Quite beautiful, with the thin crescent moon on its back and partially illuminated by earth-shine.
  9. Hawksmoor

    Antares

    By Hawksmoor,

    Every year in June the red super-giant star Antares becomes visible from our south facing bedrooms and over the roof tops. This year Saturn can be seen just above the claws of Scorpius,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,quite a sight without binoculars or a telescope.
     
    I managed to get a nice photo with my little Lumix compact camera balanced on the window-sill. The minimal light pollution after midnight and the lightly applied assistance of APS providing all the help this inexpensive camera needs to capture this star 600 light years distant and nearing the end of its pre-supernova existence.
     

  10. Hawksmoor

    Apollo11

    By Hawksmoor,

    After reading the many tributes to Neil Armstrong, I remembered looking at the Apollo photographs on display at the Hayden Planetarium, American Museum of Natural History, New York. The next time I look at the Moon through the eyepiece of my scope, and if the phase is favourable, I will be sure to check out the Sea of Tranquility and consider the relative permanence of Neil Armstrong's boot print etched in Moon-dust! A fitting memorial for a remarkable human-being. (Images of the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base etc courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University)
  11. Hawksmoor
    I am just about recovering from my second bout with the Covid virus so I thought I would do something vaguely astronomical which wasn't cloud dependant.  We have had a lot of clouds in Lowestoft recently. I discovered a nearly completed low resolution transmission spectrometer with fixed slit in the shed which I was building some time ago for obtaining the spectrum of extended objects. Sounds very technical but as per my norm, very Valerie Singleton and Chad Valley.
    Anyway somewhere in the past I read that it was possible to obtain a spectrum of sunlight by connecting a fibre optic cable to a spectrometer/camera set up and retiring immediately. No collimating and focussing lenses involved! Now I may have imagined this, probably the drugs! 
    So being bored I finished off the spectrometer, fixed an audio fibre optic cable to the front end and my modded Canon 200d to the other end. When I pointed the end of the fibre optic cable at the sun I was able to snap away and collect some data which I promptly stacked. 
    I then set about reducing the data to create a spectrum profile.  This is probably where I went wrong. First, how was I going to calibrate the profile which was all very lowercase squiggles? Well as the image encompassed the zero, first and second orders,  I could approximately identify one point 0 on the x axis. 
    I then remembered that the temperature of the Sun roughly obeys Wien's law and as the internet could provide the visible wavelength at which the Sun delivers max flux I could obtain a second calibration point on the x axis for the highest y axis point on the flux curve. A linear calibration could then be performed. 
    As I knew our Sun is a G2V star, I used this profile to correct my image profile for camera response. 
    All very well but am I fooling myself? 
    I remember being set an exercise by the legendary lighting Engineer, Joe Lines. It was 1969 and I was living a bohemian student life in Manchester. We had to create a lighting scheme and provide all the relevant calculations. I set about the task with much enthusiasm, a little knowledge and even less talent. A week later, project completed, I handed in my weighty treatise and awaited assessment by Joe. A further week later my flat mate Paul collected his and my now 'marked' submissions and left mine on my desk in my squalid room. Written on the bottom in red ink was "7/10  Stop fooling yourself Roberts". This came as something of a shock because Joe Lines was an extremely patient and kind man! What could this possibly mean?
    What I only found out months afterwards, was that my friend Paul had added all the words after "7/10". I believe from that day onwards, I have suffered from what they now call 'imposters syndrome'.
    I attach photos as supportive evidence of how wrong you can be!
    George 'coughing' in an overcast Lowestoft
     
     
     


  12. Hawksmoor
    Just got back from Iceland having enjoyed a few days sploshing about in the geothermal waters, looking at waterfalls and geysers and eating lots of cod. As you can imagine, we were very excited at the prospect of seeing the Aurora Borealis.  Unsurprisingly, nights went by under a dense blanket of cloud. Then, on the morning of the last full day of our holiday, the sun came out and so did we.  After a full 10 hours traipsing about a glacier and investigating basalt columns on a black beach we returned to our hotel in Reykjavik.  Night fell - clunk!  One by one all the light pollution came on all over the city - but what was that faint sepulchre glow advancing from the far North across the slate grey Arctic Ocean?  Hurrah at the twelfth hour we got to see the Northern Lights. An excellent display it was too - lasting for about three hours. With the naked eye we could clearly distinguish green , magenta and blue light and we managed to take some photographs. Our astronomical cup overflowed.
    I have attached a rough and ready annimation which gives some impression from the early moments of the display.
     

  13. Hawksmoor
    Have returned from Hospital after back surgery. Have got a few aches and pains but otherwise I think the good old NHS has fixed my spine!! Whoopee-do I shall be able to use my big bins again!! Am unable to get outside stargazing for a few weeks but hopefully towards the end of November I should be able to use my telescope and relatively new planetary camera to capture Jupiter! I have noticed that its still raining!
  15. Hawksmoor

    Chasing the Eclipse

    By Hawksmoor,

    As the weather forecast -Lowestoft seafront for the 20th March - was for cloud, cloud and more cloud, my partner and I set off for predicted 'clearing skies' in rural Lincolnshire. This required an early morning call at 4.30am. Strewth this was just like being back at worK! Anyway after quick coffee and cereal, we leapt into rhe 'family wagon' and headed at a brisk pace north west. It was a dark and stormy morning, but as we approached our favoured observation site, a recently manured field twixt Gedney and Holbeach in Lincolnshire, the clouds began to evaporate. As we set up our camera and laptop the sun suddeny appeared through and between the clouds. Donning our eclipse glasses we assumed our default nerd personae and were approached almost immediately by a journalist and photographer from the local newspaper. Clearly, we were a two for the price of one photo opportunity. A number of passing and local folk enquired as to our purpose and state of mind. Many were genuienely impressed by the live view image on my Canon DSLR, of the moon moving infront of the sun.
    We managed to capture some nice images and video of the eclipse. After packing our kit in the back of the car we adjourned to the near by tea room for mushrooms on toast and hot chocolate. At midday, we set off back home to Lowestoft.
    Days later the memory of the eclipse still lingers, as does the smell of manure in our car!

  16. Hawksmoor

    Christmas Day Dip

    By Hawksmoor,

    Invited by two of our children and grandchildren to meet them, early on Christmas morning, on the beach at Southwold for a swim. Had serious misgivings about this: as I dont do getting up early,  I do not have a wet suit and recently have been under the weather.   Anyway as my partner does have wet suit and was keen, a few bah-humbugs thrown in my general direction got me out of my 'toastie slumber chariot' before 8:00 UT and by 10:00 we were at the water's edge. There had been a hard frost overnight   but by the time we entered the water, the air temperature was a balmy 2 deg C . I managed a brisk 2 minutes before I fully realised why in previous years I had restricted swimming in the North Sea to the months of June, July, August and September.  
    Enjoy your Boxing Day Stargazers
    George thankfully no longer in the North Sea and in Lowestoft
     

  18. Hawksmoor
    Well last night, my partner's Aurora alarm app went off whilst we were having dinner - so pudding had to wait!  We loaded the tripod and camera bag into the family truckster and headed off to Corton Beach under cloudy but clearing skies.  Sadly, the street lights dont go out until midnight so Corton Beach, relatively close to our house, provides a dark site with a northerly view back over the cliffs largely missing the 'orange glow' that is Great Yarmouth. Whilst we were on the Beach the clouds began to clear and both of us thought we could see a green glow over the cliffs and just below the tail of the Great Bear. Anyway I took a number of photographs the best of which was taken whilst the app was telling us that photography would show the aurora from most of England. I have attached the image - 20 sec exposure - ISO1600 - F3.5 - tripod mounted Canon 600D DSLR - 18-55mm at 18 lens  which has had the following image processing :
    Application of autocolour at about 20% Colour saturation enhancement using LAB color and adjustment of channels by increasing contrast. Colour blurring using a gaussian blur. Saturation of red and yellow colours reduced to reduce the orange red glow of some 'low pressure' sodium street lighting that I could not avoid when taking a photograph looking north. General lowering of saturation across all colours and some repetitive luminosity layers to finish I think it shows some auroral activity. Looks very much like the low level auroral display that I photographed in Tromso several years ago. But as my partner says when I reach for the 'imaging software' - "Cheating again" - So who knows for sure ?
    A bit of a bonus was the very dark sky view east out across the North Sea.  Quite beautiful. We watched the Pleiades rise out of the sea and the Milky Way was absolutely marvellous. The dark lanes of dust could be traced with your finger and the Andromeda Galaxy was an easy spot with the naked eye. I took a sequence of images more or less centred on the Double Cluster in Perseus - 6x20 secs RAW-ISO3200 f=18 and F3.5- stacked in DSS - FITSwork etc.  I do like widefield astro photography and very much enjoy reading articles and viewing widefield images created by Professor Ian Morison - I have some way to go!
    It was very nice to see a couple of meteors - one was quite bright - and to capture the less than bright one shooting by and just under Messier 31 - an exposition in 'near and far'.
     
     


  19. Hawksmoor
    Having completed the excellent and free Future Learn - Open University short course - 'Data to Insight' (University of Auckland) I finally got around to doing something with the copious amounts of data churned out by my SDR LVST (The Lowestoft Very Small Telescope) meteor catcher. I decided to first apply my 'forensic intellect -Dr Lecter'🤓 to the 2016 Perseid Shower (I had a set of data collected from the 4th to 16th of August). 
    Having done a bit of reading - an American paper from the 1990s - 'Statistical properties of meteors from a simple passive forward scatter system' by D D Meisel & J E Richardson  and the excellent - Detection & Analysis of Meteors by RADAR (Using the GRAVES space surveillance transmitter) by Dr David Morgan 2011, I decided to have a go at 'gaining some insight from the data', even though I'm more at home with a sketch book than a calculator.  As I'm fully aware that many SGL members are former scientists and engineers - please be gentle with me and some of the 'broad -brush' simplifications and approximations I have made.  I'm quite prepared to believe that I have made many school boy errors both in principle and detail!
    I have organised the data using the accepted categories for meteor reflections - Over dense O, Under dense U and Transition T. 
    I have filtered and manipulated the observations to create data sets:
    O+U (including T) Cleaned source set) O-T (O excluding T) Subset U+T (excluding O) Subset  O+T (excluding U) Subset Creating the subsets was all a bit hit and miss and the procedure developed on an iterative basis. (As my partner is often known to say about my more off centre ideas "It might be getting a bit Goldilocks and the Three Bears")
    The 'full monty' including my interpretation of the data is on my LVST site:
    https://sites.google.com/yahoo.co.uk/thelvst/2016-perseid-meteor-shower
    The following extract from the LVST relates to O+U data:
    Filtering the full set of reflection observations O+U by removing all data where maxpower x duration (energy) <250 to create a new subset O+T
    The graph of reflection observations O+T plotted against the (24 hour) day date indicates :
     
    Overall the period during which data was collected 18,887 reflections were recorded.  This is  57.7% of the total number of reflections observed and represents only those reflections having a maxpower x duration =or>250 cycles (approx 3 secs).
    With 95% confidence:
     The maximum number of observations - between 16.87 and 17.96 % - were recorded on the 6th August.
    Between 11.53 and 12.46 % were recorded on the 7th of August.
    Between 10.89 and 11.8 % were recorded on the 10th of August.*
    The minimum number of observations - between 3 and 3.55 % occurred on the 4th August.
    *note: because of the small over lap between lowest and highest values on the confidence bars for the 7th and 10th. we cannot be 95% confident with regard to relative values of observations between these two days.  

    The graph of  reflection observations O+T plotted against the hour of the day (UT) indicates with 95% confidence :
    One max peak, a smaller peak, a approximately even base line and one trough in observations: 
    Max peak (approximately 5.5% of all observations)  between 2:00 and 8:00 UT.
    A smaller peak between 14:00 and 17:00 UT.
    A base line (approximately 4% of all observations)  at 0:00 and between 9:00 - 13:00 UT.,
    A deep minimum between 18:00 and 22:00 UT
    The plot of days against radial velocity for the O+T subset of observations is interesting in that it shows outliers of observations, particularly on 7th and 14th of August, grouped around radial velocities lower than the mean radial velocity (+367 m per sec with SD = 131.8) for the O+T subset.

    For the Observations O+T the plot of Observations per day against Observations per hour coloured to show differences in radial velocity is interesting. To aid clarity and understanding the data has been 'binned' on a hexagonal basis. The size of the hexagon is proportional to the number of observations.
    The observations made between 14:00 and 1900 (UT) on the 7th of August indicate a large number of reflections with radial velocities well below the mean value for V. The timing of these observations in the afternoon is also at odds with other days where observation density clustering is clearly skewed to the morning. Do these factors reinforce the hypothesis that a stream other than the Perseids is being detected? Could this be an outlier from the Capricornids or the Alpha Capricornids streams which are active into August?
    The same observations coloured to show energy (maxpower x duration) indicate the reflections in the afternoon of the 7th of August have a greater proportion of lower energy reflections. The Capricornids are slow moving meteors and have lower velocities (lower energies?) as well as having velocity vectors different  from the Perseids.
    I hope to analyse more of the data I have stored on pen drives and hopefully make comparisons between different showers and the same showers year on year. Even now I'm retired, I still seem to run out of time! 🙄

     





  20. Hawksmoor

    DIY put together wide-field camera

    By Hawksmoor,


    Imaging Equipment
    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 be more sensitive to H-alpha.  BUT - old Hoya lenses have male 42mm 1mm thread connections and modern 42mm kit comes with 0.75mm threads.  Try as I might none of the UK suppliers or even  China appeared to have an appropriate adapter. In the end I found what I wanted - a 42mm(1mm) to T2 adapter on the RAF internet site based  in Belarus.  I already had the spacer and the C/CS connector I needed to complete the camera.  After placing my order the adapter arrived in the post from  'Sergei' in Moscow. A very nicely engineered bit of kit! How a meerkat could make such a brilliant thing with small furry paws escapes me!
    I do enjoy messing about in my shed with old bits and pieces!
    I briefly tested the camera the other night in less than good conditions and it appeared to work delivering an image roughly 6 degrees square. The weather is forecast fair for tonight so  I might try it out properly on the realm of galaxies in Virgo. 
    Ever onwards and upwards!
     


  22. Hawksmoor

    Enthusiasm

    By Hawksmoor,

    Last night, I stood and watched as my ten year old grandson looked through my old 10x50 binoculars and found for his first time; the Andromeda Galaxy and then the Pleiades. Looking out into space and back in time is and should always be very exciting! He was very pleased with himself. Binoculars are a great way into astronomy for the younger child. Negligible set up and minimal supervision required - wide variety of observeable treats and maximum time taking in the view! Have set him a challenge to find the monthly binocular highlights in my astronomy magazine and am looking forward to his reports..
  23. Hawksmoor

    Excitement mounts

    By Hawksmoor,

    It's a very miserable afternoon in Lowestoft. It is raining and the sky is an unrelieved expanse of grey stretching from horizon to horizon. Early this morning the sky was clearer but not sufficiently devoid of cloud to permit the useful deployment of my 'scope. Due mainly to my overwhelming cheerfulness, I spent a happy pre-dawn hour with my 11x80mm binoculars looking at all the usual summer astro-culprits . This afternoon I have been removing malware with mixed success from two laptops. Why do companies and individuals invest so much time in devising and spreading digital diseases across the internet?
     
    On a much more positive note and egged on by my son, I purchased an Altair Astro Lightwave 66ED-R refractor to go on my Star Adventurer mount. Its a very nice looking bit of kit, all new and nicely engineered in its aluminium travel case. Next month I'm off to Northumberland for a week's holiday, so weather permitting and assisted by some of my grandchildren, I should be aquiring some widefield photographs of the 'dark' night sky. No wonder excitement mounts!
  24. Hawksmoor
    Bodging around with aluminium off-cuts in my shed

    I thought it would be useful if I could piggyback my cameras and smaller scopes on my 127mm. refractor mounted on a NEQ6 Pro. The weight would not exceed the maximum load and I already had an extension bar which would enable me to balance the different set ups.  I had some bits of aluminium in the shed and time on my hands.
    Now, I know the workmanship is bit ‘here and there’ but I do not possess a pillar drill or much patience. I do however; have lots of nuts and bolts from Poundland and gallons of Gorilla Glue.  The fixing-plate cost very little and kept me amused for a couple of days - so as of this moment, I’m pleased with it!  Whether it works imaging wise remains to be seen and looking at the clouds overhead it might be sometime before I get to find out.






  25. Hawksmoor

    Full Moon

    By Hawksmoor,

    [ATTACH]237[/ATTACH]
    The Universe is a great place! In the last week I have watched as Comet Garradd sailed serenely past the Coat-hanger asterism, I've seen a magnificent rainbow whilst visiting Sheffield, and on the road back to home in Lowestoft we headed from day into night as the Moon and Jupiter climbed slowly upwards from the horizon.
    Weather and moonlight permitting, in the coming week I hope to see the new supernova.:)
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