Category Archives: Astro Equipment

On-mount USB hubs

Posted on August 30, 2019 by james

With the proliferation of devices attached directly or indirectly to my telescope mounts it seemed sensible to consider placing a USB hub directly on the mount and running a single USB cable to the controlling PC, rather than having a … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy | Leave a comment

Telescope Polar Alignment, Part Three — The Return of PHD2

Posted on August 21, 2019 by james

As mentioned in an earlier post, the last mount in my observatory cannot be polar aligned directly as it has no view of the celestial pole. After giving things a bit of time I decided I’d just have to bite … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Telescope Polar Alignment, Part Two

Posted on August 20, 2019 by james

The computery side of my observatory is going to be Linux-based, as far as possible, so I’ve had it in the back of my head that I’d be running something like Kstars and Ekos to control the mount and other … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy, Observatory | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Telescope mount polar alignment

Posted on August 20, 2019 by james

The observatory having reached a point where it’s usable, the first job was polar alignment of the RA axis of the mounts. When setting up on a nightly basis I’ve always just tried to get Polaris in roughly the right … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy, Observatory | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Linux Mint 19 on an HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Mini

Posted on August 12, 2019 by james

I picked up a couple of these second-hand recently, to use in the observatory. They came with Windows 10 installed, but I don’t care about that. I want to run Linux Mint on them. I tried a couple of times … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Computing, Linux | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Maplins XM21X PSU failure

Posted on June 4, 2019 by james

I’ve used a couple of these power supplies for a few years for powering my NEQ6 and HEQ5 telescope mounts, but recently one of them just stopped working. It has been sitting in the workshop for a fair while waiting … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy | Tagged | Leave a comment

Repairs to a cheap illuminated reticle eyepiece

Posted on June 4, 2019 by james

Hopefully when the sky is next clear at night I can get around to polar aligning my mounts, but before that I wanted to align the finders and main telescopes so I dug out an illuminated reticle eyepiece that I … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy | Leave a comment

A new mount clutch lever

Posted on September 2, 2018 by james

On my EQ3-2 mount I wanted to mess around with the shape of the DEC clutch lever a little to give more clearance for hardware on the mount. I don’t want to damage the supplied (metal) lever however, so I … Continue reading →

Posted in 3D Printing, Astro Equipment, Astronomy | Tagged | Leave a comment

Star Adventurer Polar Scope Alignment

Posted on May 9, 2018 by james

Having checked the tracking accuracy of my Star Adventurer already, I wanted to make sure the polar scope was correctly aligned before trusting it to location the pole using Polaris. There are a couple of things to worry about for … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy | Tagged | Leave a comment

Star Adventurer Tracking Accuracy Results

Posted on April 27, 2018 by james

After running for 24 hours I stopped the SA running and measured the distance from the finishing point to my initial mark: Looks like it’s gone a bit too far. However, that’s in a solar day, not a sidereal day, … Continue reading →

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astroimaging, Astronomy | Tagged | Leave a comment