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Thanks, but I already have it myself. Anyway, the Pi has a fully functional C compiler and Perl interpreter which are my languages of choice and how I implement such code on all my other Linux boxen..
On further thought, I also have the Pi IR-enabled camera so no need for a web cam, USB connection, fancy interfacing software, etc.
Now wondering how much extra it would cost to go the whole hog and put a plate solver into the system. A Pi with a 32G SSD would have easily enough power to run it. Use a phone as a display and controller over wifi. Optics are 50mm refractor and web cam on a standard finder bracket, to which the Pi would also be attached. A pity a USB cable would still be needed but a rechargeable battery could presumably be attached to the mount somewhere, even on a Dob.
Major development cost would be writing software.
Hmm. I have a Pi-3 over in La Palma. Might have a play when I return there.
We did consider using Uranometria as a guide to star hopping, but I’m afraid the Bodleian didn’t seem keen to lend out their copy ….
How faint do you need to go? Freely available charts reach mag 7. Here is one of Orion, for example, and another around the NCP.
Something which worked well for us back in the day was to get a 10 foot long cast iron pipe, complete with drilled flanges at each end, from a scrap yard. It was painted inside and out with bituminous paint. A hole of suitable dimensions was dug so that a plug of concrete 3 feet thick and three in diameter could hold the bottom of the pipe, which was buried to slightly more than half its length. The inside of the pipe was then filled with sand. The top flange was ideal for attaching an equatorial head.
The fundamental vibration mode and small harmonics were heavily damped by the concrete and through being clamped with back-filled sand. The internal sand quenched high frequency vibrations very effectively.
It was possible to have one person placing fingertips very gently on one side of the pipe while another hit it as hard as possible with a length of 2×3 on the opposite side and still feel no vibrations.
I saw a weather report yesterday. Unfortunately I failed to save the URL. It would be nice to have a more authoritative source than that given below but …
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1427137/space-weather-forecast-solar-storm-aurora-evg
Does this help? Being an Oxford man I went to the Bod, which led me to this:
An interlibrary loan may be possible. Worth asking, anyway.
Hmm, I wonder if it is akin to SN1987A? I doubt that the LMC would be readily visible at that distance.
Detection of Rotational Variability in Floofy Objects at Optical Wavelength https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16636The first Dobsonian I had showed serious spherical aberration.
Worked just fine as a light bucket, which I what I wanted it for.
Yes!
Please try it if you can; you only have a few more days of it being bright enough.
Really regretting not being in La Palma right now.
Further: note that the proposed rotation period of only 25 seconds implies that exposures of only a few seconds will be needed to get a good light curve. In practice, this suggests only 0.7m-class or larger telescopes will be able to do this successfully, likely implying the use of robotic telescopes.
Getting colour indices, on the other hand, should be somewhat easier as exposures >25s will average out the rotational behaviour. This could be a productive use of personal telescopes fitted with two or more standard photometric filters.
My thanks to Richard Miles and Tomasz Kwiatkowski for the further information.
And vice versa, in my experience. Over-long USB cables can give connection problems which are sometimes solved by using a powered hub.
Try it both ways, in other words.
I have absolutely no idea whether this might be an explanation, but I believe that aurorae produce radio waves which can be picked up by radio receivers.
There have been documented cases of unexpected diodes (akin to the good old cat’s whisker) producing audio outputs from AM radio transmissions. A few cases involved mercury amalgam dental fillings, for example.
I wonder whether this may be relevant.
You could always just suck it and see. It shouldn’t take more than one night to take dozens of exposures of a relatively bright star at a variety of settings. Then process them and see what works best for your equipment.
You make a good point, but up here in the sub-arctic the night time is very often at or below fridge temperature (~5C). When it doesn’t it often never gets dark at night anyway.
At the opposite extreme, a good calima in La Palma can result in the air temperature being higher than 20C all night and even a good two-stage Peltier cooler can’t get a camera much below -15C. Been there, done that.
I have an Odroid running Ubuntu and Kstars/EKOS as a proposed replacement TCS. I have been quite unable to find a driver for the dome controller (a Vellman board) and there are still teething problems with the mount (a FS2 controller). All the SX kit works perfectly; not yet tried the focuser. It will be months before I can return to La Palma and try to resolve these issues. 8-(
A Celestron NEXIMAGE 5 purchased via the BAA forum also fails to work under the local Ubuntu installation but I have found a package which claims to contain a driver for the camera.
Other people with more main-stream equipment have no significant problems with Linux-based controllers.
