2008
Things have been quiet on the web site with the project coming to a close and getting used to living in the new accommodation taking priority over posting stuff here.
So here for 2008 is the page that will probably wrap this project up.
The focal point of the house is indeed the new kitchen and living area.
This was at Xmas.
To the surprise of many (including the recipient), Xmas saw the arrival of a hen coop and run and on New Year's Eve we went to Catterick and returned with four 24 week hens.
They have settled in remarkably well and once they were all in lay have presented us with 3 or 4 eggs a day.
Princess and Susie - Pied Suffolk and Fenning Sussex
Henrietta a Fenning Black
and finally Bluebell a Columbine.
For the last week we have had a cold snap with a few days of constantly sub-zero temperatures. The frost has steadily built up so here are some views.
Sycamores may be weeds, but the frost on their "shell" of leaves (or twigs at this time of year) against the dark branches looks good I think.
View across the village, it really did look just like this - frost everywhere and fog limiting the visibility to 600 metres or so. Lovely but bitterly cold.
I have left this October pic here since settling in and having some space again has allowed me to get the telescope set up.
It now has electric focusing using a stepper motor and my own software to control it. The system also uses a stepper to change filters as well. At the moment it is all in the music room, looking out through the french windows. A few issues to iron out and then its down to the observatory.
This was taken at 06:54 (BST) on the 7th of October. Venus is on the right and it shows how we just missed the occultation of Regulus (the point of light at the left end of the Moon's arc). I haven't yet seen any reports but from 20 miles or so South of here the starlight would have blinked on and off as it passed "behind" the Moon's hills and mountains. In retrospect it might have been a more impressive sight than McLaren yet again trashing Lewis Hamilton's championship opportunity, but the full effect would only have been visible along a very narrow band - less than a kilometre I think.
Slight cheat this, taken from a little way up the hill. The two pairs of trees in the centre are my farthest visible points from outside the music room just on 1.5 miles.
This uses these trees to help work out my fields of view for different eyepieces and so on.
My best two from the first batch of moon shots using the new imager camera.
The software automatically tracks the image on a selected bright spot (small crater in this case) and averages successive shots provided they are sharp enough. These two each comprise around 20 - 25 individual images. These are 640 x 480 (original size) JPGs so there should be an immediate quality improvement by going to a "zero loss" image format.
Mare Imbrium top left and Mare Serenitatis bottom centre. North is at about 1 o'clock.
The sunlit rim of the west wall of Sinus Iridium is "suspended" in the blackness at top left. Through the eyepiece, this was beautiful.
South is at 7 o'clock. ^ Clavius with the arc of 4 craters and above this is Tycho with its characteristic central peak.
Pleased though I am with these, comparison with my old shots taken with a handheld CoolPix through the eyepiece of Alan's 6" Newtonian suggests there's a way to go yet.
The aim of the current light bucket of course was to try and look further away. I have a few images of the Orion Nebula but they are single shots which show that I need better tracking, some narrow bandwidth filters and a better imager.
This is the current rig with an eyepiece fitted in the filter wheel with its motor to change from one filter to another, to the right is the (black) laser sight and then the finderscope with a webcam attached to it (currently struggling with getting enough gain to see stars with this). The white box bottom centre contains the control board for the stepper motors. It is behind the focus motor which drives directly onto the focuser's own 10:1 reduction gear. At 7500 steps of the motor for full focus range it seems to work very well. There is an aluminium plate between the white box and the 'scope, this is set up to take the SLR for wide angle shots.
This lot comes to one (old style) serial and 4 USB connections to a pair of laptops.