Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Indeed. I’ve been doing this for years with a cheap Dell in the observatory. My PC death rate is around one death every 2-3 years but I keep a disk image so replacement is dead easy. Windows RDP is certainly secure enough to use on an internal network. I wouldn’t expose it directly to the internet though unless your network firewall can restrict access to particular IPs.
The GPL Positional Astronomy Library (PAL) can be found on Github here. It is an open-source reworking of Patrick Wallace’s slalib and it contains all the functions you need to do this. Alternatively the original slalib in Fortran is GPL and should be available somewhere. Even if you can’t use these functions directly they are a good source of information on how to do the conversion accurately.
Yes, that’s the micrometer. Imagine taking a long exposure of a comet (30 mins to an hour) using offset guiding on a star. The micrometer was rotated to the appropriate PA and then used to get the correct offset rate. If you messed up you wouldn’t know until you developed the single film frame sometime later. Imaging was really hard work in those days! Have a look at this example and read the caption to see what I mean.
Yes, Mike will be very sadly missed. He was director of the Comet Section at a key time which included the return of 1P/Halley. Mike edited the BAA Memoir on this comet which was a huge undertaking. We have the Newsletters from that time available online via the link in here and they are a good example of how different observing was in those far off days. The attached pics show Mike with the 25cm reflector he used for his Halley imaging and the 6-inch Cooke that he used for his prominence images that Richard has posted.
Grant,
My only experience of USB over Ethernet has been very bad, and that was using a pro system in work. Much easier to buy a cheap PC from ebay, stick it in the observatory, leave it running permanently, connect a Cat 6 LAN cable to it, then run all the USB connections locally. You can then either remote desktop to it or run ASCOM remote from inside. Much more reliable and it’ll set you back £50 or so.
If I remember correctly Gary Poyner had a heater like that in his telescope and came out one day to find that it had caught fire and melted his telescope tube. I’m sure it worked well at stopping condensation though…
Dave,
That’s a good question. The BAA has a proud history of encouraging and collecting observations from its observers and then performing analysis on the results, often in cooperation with professional partners.
In the Comet Section we archive all suitable submitted images here. These images help us understand the morphology (shape and activity) of comets and their tails. Estimates of brightness (photometry) are submitted to COBS or directly and these are used to generate comet magnitude parameters and look for differences from return to return. They also contribute to predictions for future returns. Positions (astrometry) are submitted directly to the MPC and these go towards computing the orbital path of comets. Monitoring comets for outbursts is also important work which often leads to very interesting results. Have a look at the results for the recent outburst of 174P reported here.
A summary of observations of bright comets is published annually in the JBAA and special events (such as outbursts) are written up as papers. We also have a section discussion list here which is used as a forum for comet related discussions. We have close links with international comet groups and professionals and we know that observations from BAA observers are often used in their analyses.
Nick.
It’s probably better to put things like this on your members page. People will see it there and can comment if they wish.
Those are really useful resources although it took me a while to realise that the “Event” heading in the table here was actually the date!
It’s also worth calibrating the camera since, depending on the model, you may have a few fields of buffering depending on the sensor readout before the analogue video gets out of the camera. I’m sure that the UK asteroid occultation guys (Tim, Alex etc) will have a good handle on that.
Jeremy – You might want to consider posting items like this to your members page. That has the advantage that all of your postings are in one place. People can still comment if necessary.
Here are a few screengrabs from the infamous Channel 4 documentary “Earth Calling Basingstoke” featuring some of John’s telescopes and his mirror grinding machine. The whole documentary is on Youtube. It was not amateur astronomy’s finest hour.
Very impressive. 3D printing (or ALM as we should call it now) really is quite a mature technology. What printer are you using?
I suspect that would be a bit high-brow for most US commercial FM stations and one wouldn’t want to condone putting someone’s eyes out just because they didn’t cut their hair.
Steve – I remember driving back from the eclipse and they were playing “eclipse related” tracks in rotation on most of the Nebraska FM stations we could find. TEotH was one, You’re So Vain was another. Then the eclipse connection got really weak.
Grant – Nice. This Celestron astrograph seems to perform very well at f/2.2 although your H18 isn’t that much of a test for a thing that is supposed to have a 40mm diameter well corrected focal plane! Are you going to try it with a bigger sensor? I’d certainly be interested to see how it performs in real life with a full-frame (36x24mm) sensor.
Andrew – Nice observation. I guess this is way too faint to see any colour in the SN even with the 24-inch.
