Review: Terrans Industry OnStep V4 kit for CG5
For a few years I’ve been accumulating the bits required to create a much more portable setup for my venerable old CG5 mount. This mount was purchased in about 2002…
Allskycam Site Under Construction
This site has moved from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to RackNerd and it’s going to take a bit of time to migrate all of the data from the old site…
Limits on use of spherical mirrors on Newtonian telescopes
(Reprinted from David Knisely, Prairie Astronomy Club, Inc. to ensure it doesn’t disappear into the ether) In a Newtonian telescope, a parabolic mirror is usually used, since thatsurface focuses light…
Detecting Clouds With Machine Learning
Automating my home observatory has been a lot of fun, and a lot of challenges as well! For new readers my home observatory is a 5×5 micro-observatory (i.e. no room…
Centaurus A Final
Centaurus A (also known as ARP 152, NGC 5128 or Caldwell 77) is a galaxy in the constellation of Centaurus. It was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop…
Casting A Tile Grinding Tool
Today I cast a tool to use to grind my 10″ mirror blank, something I haven’t done in a looong time. But it went pretty well. The one unusual thing…
Truncating a Telescope
So the conclusion of my experimentation with the 10″ F/4.7 on the NEQ6 is too long, too heavy. So it’s off the mount, being replaced by my 8″ SCT with…
Quick look at M42 In Orion
A quick session tonight getting my telescope back up and running after the frigid weather this winter caused some issues with the cabling. Now I have move all of the…
First look at Centaurus A
Since the weather outside is frightful I decided to take an image of a Southern galaxy not visible in Winnipeg using iTelescope 59 in Siding Springs, Australia, a 20″ F/6.8…
INDI-Allsky Software Review
A New Allsky Camera Application By Gord Tulloch Over the last few years I have been using the Thomas Jaquin (TJ) allsky camera software with great success, as have several…