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As I live in Wales and traveling to London I find difficult and with lockdowns impossible I do enjoy the webinars and appreciate the hard work of those involved in bringing them to us. I certainly hope these will continue.
One way to go about it is to find a comfortable position to sit or stand and measure your eyelevel from the ground. Subtract from this the height of the mount from where it would join the pier to the position of the eyepiece when your telescope is at the lowest practical observing position and also when the telescope is at it’s highest practical observing position. That should give you an idea of the pier height. depending on your interests and location you might find there’s a certain ‘band’ of altitude your favorite objects reside in I’m thinking of planets or the Moon which will make choosing the pier height a bit easier.
Another method may seem a bit odd. But if you get a pole higher than the top of the sides of your observatory you wedge it in the vertical position. This simulates the pier. Next take another pole which will simulate the telescope and tie it with string to what you think is a suitable height to the vertical pole. You then can pivot the pole simulating the telescope up and down to find out if the observing height is practical. If not just untie the ‘telescope pole’ and move it up or down the vertical pole until you are happy with the range of heights from the viewing end where an eyepiece would be. Measure on the vertical pole the point where the ‘telescope pole’ is to the ground and subtract from this the height of the mount and you will arrive at your desired pier height.
If you change your telescope you might have to put an extension piece on top of the pier or use steps.
I hope this helps
Interesting news
The website Earthsky seems to have broke the story early then removed it however the google cache still has it. Well done Cardiff who toook the lead on this research
I agree with Neil, a montage from the observing sections would be very fitting for the 100th edition, not sure if there would be room for all of them or the sections which no longer function like star colours.
Just curious when was the spectrum taken as around 23:30 BST on Saturday night a bright red meteor in the west was reported on the Facebook Valleys Astronomy group page. The observation was made from South Wales.
The book by Sue French also called Deep Sky Wonders has quite a good selection of planetary nebulae. The Walter Scott Huston book of the same name not only commands eye watering prices second hand as it’s well out of print but is a totally different book to Sue French’s.
Excellent pictures.
As I’ve got the day off work I got up at 2am only to find the comet behind a large tree covered hill. Waited until 2:45 for the comet to clear the distant hill only to find the only patch of cloud in the sky covering the area. Such are the joys of living in a Welsh valley. Still there is always next time
You could try contacting this website
Or there is a picture at the bottom of this website page
Rother Valley Optics or 365 Astronomy might be worth contacting, I needed similar fixings but can’t remember which one had them? Both companies were very helpful.
Excellent idea Peter, I hope you share the results of your filter experiments with us as I’m interested to know what different types of filter make during daylight too.
Nice group I spotted it early this morning doing a dry run for the occultation of Venus by the Moon next week. I used a Skywatcher 90mm Evostar refractor with a Lacerta Herschel wedge on a EQ5 mount with a Synscan upgrade.
Grey and overcast in South Wales now
I’ve got a Skywatcher 90mm refractor I use for white light observation of the Sun with a Seymour solar filter or a Lacerta Herschel wedge, I do tend to use the Herschel wedge more than the Seymour filter. It’s mounted on a EQ5 with a Synscan upgrade so I’ll use that to align it with the pole and get it to find Venus without the Sun getting in the way. Clear-ish this morning so I hope the clouds stay away next week.
The position Venus will be in did pose a problem when I did a dry run this morning, the EQ5 upgrade wasn’t carried out by me, it was there when I bought the mount. The RA axis has a black plastic block as part of the upgrade which at certain positions hit’s another block on the Dec axis. You can guess what happened so I had to do a meridian flip to avoid the blocks, I think further preparation is required.
Try the link below, hope it’s useful.
