Category Archives: Astronomy

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 →

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We have fermentation!

Posted on August 20, 2019 by james

A day or so after adding the yeast to my Blobservatory Bitter, it looks like they’re hard at work. A nice raft of top-fermenting yeasty beasties…

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Blobservatory Bitter

Posted on August 20, 2019 by james

Having spent so much time over the last *mumble* months building the observatory, my brewery (which stands right next door) has been sadly neglected. We have even reached the scandalous situation where my wife has occasionally had to actually buy … Continue reading →

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M27 revisited

Posted on August 20, 2019 by james

Whilst messing about with aligning my other mounts I decided I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a bit of imaging done with the first, despite not having spend any time improving the sky model, nor having any guiding, … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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 →

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Lunar Eclipse, July 2019

Posted on August 13, 2019 by james

I’d forgotten I had these, but July this year found me in France for the lunar eclipse. By complete coincidence the second summer holiday in a row where I’d been able to watch a lunar eclipse. Sadly I was ill-prepared … Continue reading →

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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 →

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Building an observatory. Construction #80

Posted on August 10, 2019 by james

I didn’t have a lot of time this evening, but took a monitor, keyboard and mouse down to the warm room, connected them and one of the pier computers up to the KVM switch and powered everything on. All the … Continue reading →

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Building an observatory. Construction #79

Posted on August 10, 2019 by james

I’m pleased to be able to relate that all the mains wiring in the observatory is now complete and it is connected up to the existing supply from the house. I no longer have extension leads and trailing sockets all … Continue reading →

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