Category Archives: Astronomy

Building an observatory. Construction #21

But for a foggy start it has been a lovely day here today, allowing me to skip off work for a few hours and get some welding done. So at long last, here we have it. Pretty much all the … Continue reading

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Building an observatory. Construction #20

I had hoped to get to the point where the roof frame could be put in place this weekend, but the weather had other ideas and my time to work on the roof was limited to a couple of hours … Continue reading

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Building an observatory. Construction #19

The next step with the roof is to put some bracing across some of the joins, partly to strengthen them, but also to provide fixing points for the rest of the roof. I had some spare steel sheet to do … Continue reading

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Building an observatory. Construction #18

A moment of truth now, when I try to put everything I’ve constructed piecemeal all together to form the entire roof. The first job was to take the two sides and get them set up parallel and square to each … Continue reading

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“Astro Swag”

It’s been some time since I posted about oacapture, but work progresses with that as I have time. One of the things I’ve been working on is using an external timer and camera controller for generating timestamped images of occultations. … Continue reading

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Building an observatory. Construction #17

I’ve started work on the frames for the sides of the roof now. Below is my solution for fitting the wheels (I’ve decided to use just four as they’re supposed to be good to carry 250kg each and the entire … Continue reading

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Building an observatory. Construction #16

The next step in the roof construction was to join some of the roof frames together. If I’d joined all four however I’d have ended up with something too big to manage, so I’ve paired up the four frames to … Continue reading

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Building an observatory. Construction #15

Time to start welding! This took somewhat longer than I planned (what doesn’t? :D. In part because it’s years since I did any welding and most of that was stick welding, not MIG. But perhaps the biggest problem was cleaning … Continue reading

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Building an observatory. Construction #14

The steel for my rolling roof finally arrived this week: sixteen three metre lengths of 25mm square section tube with a 2.5mm wall. The wait has allowed me to change the roof design several times 😀 This morning I wrote … Continue reading

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A new mount clutch lever

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

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