Welcome to the Skybadger astronomical pages.

This website is to record an interest in astronomy and share the results.

The background page attempts to explain why I am interested in astronomy and provides a potted history of astronomy experience and publications.

The equipment page more fully describes the equipment I have, its limitations and why I use it. The biggest downside to astronomy as a hobby is that it can be very expensive, especially if you haven't got the time, the skill or sometimes the equipment to make parts you need, you have to buy, beg or swap them ....

Content

News - December 2010

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I have recently begun construction of a large split ring horseshoe mount intended for big-aperture (16") observing. The optics to start with will be the Worthing Observatory Telescope optics which are a 12" Newtonian. The eventual idea here is to provide a complete small-scale observatory that is filled by a large telescope mount and telescope for remote observing. I have started assembling the the frame and the bearings etc. See the details so far here

I have been webcam imaging recently of Jupiter and the moon.

The interesting thing is the low avi quality of the source ... (noting its not from the same avi)

The moon is below, as done in poor seeing. The black spot at mid upper right is dust on the CCD

I have also been taking some DSLR images of the more obvious Messiers while I get to grips with the colour conversion from Nikon NEF in RGB to colour JPEG for display. To make life easier I bought an Off-Axis Guider of the Orion adjustable type from Bern at Modern Astronomy and machined a custom adapter for the Visac to allow the camera to reach focus on the Visac with the DSLR and Visac focal reducer.

Additions - October 2010

The recent additions to the site are :

• The Worthing Astrosoc 12" scope optics moving to a new home - 36 inch split-ring here.
• The raising of the new observatory pier. I have completed a massive new steel telescope pier and successful removal of the old one from the observatory requiring a full observatory strip-down and rebuild.
• The additions of the M-O-M Mirror making machine used for grinding a 6" first mirror..
• The system requirements and design for a Telescope system controllerconsisting of motors, encoders, handset, telescope pointing model and PEC.
• The ASCOM dome automation pages under the techniques section to finish off the record of the Skybadger observatory automation. Note that these are still missing the drive belt and sprockets modification to provide more torque to the dome rim using 1/2" pitch drive belt glued on. Pictures are at the bottom of the page.

Finally each telescope mount will have a choice of drives - one an iOptron drive system and hand controller, one I'm writing myself and the last a spare SS2K I have on the GPDX currently.

The old Astro Systems of Luton Mount purchased from MikeMS which was to be the basis of my long term heavyweight telescope mounting capability is now complete, tested and mounted on the pier in the observatory.

More details with pictures here

Projects in Astronomy include:

• After swapping the Newtonian Mount and OTA with MikeMS for a MoM mirror grinding machine in an almost completed state, I have fixed it up, completed it, varnished it and have completed a 6" trial mirror to the polishing stage. along the way I needed to make a spherometer, mirror mount for testing, foucault tester and light source. There are some pictures:
  

• I have removed the pan-and-tilt webcam and am replacing it with a low-light wide-angle camera for monitoring the inside of the observatory. Try here for a streamed media feed, if turned on.

• Implementing the thermal scanning cloud camera on the observatory. The housing and panning mechanism is in place now. I can control and query it via VBScript here or there is the tool from DevaSys to create an image. This goes with the Devantech USB to I2C Adapter for easy Comm port access to the I2C bus. The next step is wrap this up in more script and make it create colour images from the output.

• Logging the magnetic compass field data and comparing with published magnetic field data to check whether I can use this data as an aurora alert meter.
  These results are now in and the answer is yes - if you can a sufficiently stable power supply. I'm using two 6V/3AH batteries in series to give 12V and +/-6 off a 5W solar panel and tend to get good results for a few days and the n during the day only after that as the batteries have emptied their own charge. See this page for some results : Results from a I2C robotics magnetometer

• Changing the GP-DX drive gearing from 1:1 off the motor to 1:2 off the motor. This gives increased torque at the worm for driving heavier loads. The SS2K controller has had its speed settings increased appropriately to adjust. See the above picture for details. The gears are HPC 84:42 teeth Mod 48 in steel. The boss needs to be a tight 6.0mm fit. I took a normal gear which has a 6.4mm boss and bored it out for a new boss.

Latest

Updated pictures from Noctilucent clouds, some of the familiar Messiers and lots of Jupiters.

I have just purchased a set of 12.5" Cassegrain optics from Paul through AstroBuySell. this will be nmy next project once the split-ring is complete, and mounted on the AE mount in the obervatory. Lots to learn about baffling a Cassegrain but far cheaper than say, buying a Vixen VMC300.

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