I received an email from Joao in Mexico, who has just purchased an XT10i, and had a question for me about the Intelliscope unit supplied with his new XT10i telescope. He was confused because the Intelliscope altitude encoder board supplied seemed to be too large when he came to install it on the side panel. [...] Read more »
After my experimental “first light” imaging session with my newly modified Phillips SPC900NC webcam for Long Exposures (Steve Chambers mod), I have now processed the images and this is what they look like. They’re not visually fantastic, but for a first attempt I’m well pleased. Generally they were 15-20 second exposures. They couldn’t be any [...] Read more »
Good nights for astronomy are often few and far between in the UK. We’ve had the usual run of miserable, rainy, cloudy nights. Sometimes when the early evening sky looks promising, inevitably the clouds roll in by the time we’ve had our supper!
So when a good, clear, cold night comes along you grab the opportunity, [...] Read more »
Last night/morning (Jan 29th/30th) was the first time I have been out with my C6-SGT not only for 2010, but also for a whole year (previous post explains about my pond building antics putting my astronomy on hold!).
Coming home from work the evening sky was beautifully clear, and I was in a great mood taking [...] Read more »
Happy New Year to all my readers.
My last blog post was back in April when I had used my XT10i telescope as a theodolite measuring levels for my new pond.
Blimey, after a whole years work on our new koi pond and patio I am only just getting back to doing some astronomy. My favourite hobby [...] Read more »
Just lately I’ve been too busy with a completely different kind of project for me to do any astronomy, hence the rather long delay between my previous blog post and now.
We have been completely absorbed in the evenings designing a new pond for our fish. Basically the original pond (at 400 gallons) was too small [...] Read more »
Hooray, I saw Comet Lulin tonight at last! First in my 20×80’s to see if I could locate it, then setup the XT10i and used my 38mm SWA EP to get a nice view of its fuzzy body. Using averted vision and moving my eye around the view I could clearly make out its faint [...] Read more »
Apologies to anyone who has tried using the Music Player on my Orion-XT10.com site recently, it’s been broken!
Adobe brought out Version 10 of their Flash Player recently which has tighter security, and so I needed to update the Wimpy MP3 Player that my website uses to play its music.
Unfortunately even though Wimpy provided a new [...] Read more »
Tonight on my evening walk with the dog, I took out a small pair of binos I recently bought from our local Aldi store in their basement bargains section for just 6 pounds! Not that I expected much from these 12×32 binoculars. They look ok, but are pretty basic and a bit tinny to feel, [...] Read more »
Tonight I had a go at star testing my XT10i telescope to check the collimation and optics.
There was a full moon tonight, transparency was not particularly good and only the brighter stars were properly visible, so there wasn’t much point in trying to see much else, and instead I figured better use of my time [...] Read more »
