Author Archives: james

Who’s been swimming in my pool?

Given the astonishingly good weather we decided we could justify giving the swimming pool a clean and getting it ready for use somewhat earlier in the year than we might otherwise have done. Once it was uncovered however, we found … Continue reading

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NEQ6 belt mod kit arrives

No excuses not to get on with this now. A little delayed (it was ordered at the same time as the HEQ5 Pro kit), but it has now arrived…

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Going nuts in lockdown…

Whilst I was wandering out to the veggie plot the other evening I found a series of holes dug in the grass alongside the raspberries. Closer inspection revealed that we’d had a visitor keen to retrieve something they’d hidden last … Continue reading

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HEQ5 belt mod

I’ve had my HEQ5 Pro for somewhere around seven years and to be honest it’s always sounded like a bag of nails when slewing and has had a fair bit of backlash, so the Rowan belt mod has been on … Continue reading

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Veg plot 2020, #3

Over the last weekend in April I was mostly mowing grass in the orchard and “upstairs field” and playing chainsaws. In fact I’m not really sure where the time went, but I did manage to do a bit of planting … Continue reading

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Definitely not a meteorite :(

After M51 I decided to move on to a new target and have a crack at M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. There’s been a lot of fuss about Elon Musk’s starlink constellation and the effects they’re having, and here’s the first … Continue reading

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Veg plot 2020, #2

A week or so on from my last photos and the onions are really starting to grow now (as are some of the weeds) and a few of the peas are starting to see daylight as well. These are “Sugar … Continue reading

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Veg plot 2020, #1

Vegetable seeds started arriving in the first week of April and I considered myself lucky to get so much of what I wanted given that just about everyone else in the country seemed to be trying to do the same … Continue reading

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A new “lockdown” vegetable plot

With the impending arrival of lockdown in the UK we decided that it might be useful to grow some more of our own food and it therefore became necessary to increase the space we use for growing vegetables which has … Continue reading

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A first attempt at M51

Through March and into April I attempted to image Messier 51 with my Skywatcher ED80 and Atik 314L+ (mono). I ended up with twenty-six five-minute luminance exposures and nineteen three-minute exposures for each of red, green and blue for a … Continue reading

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