53° Astro

It has been a strange couple of months, what with the current Coronavirus epidemic raging around us, but I have managed to capture a few astronomical events from the garden in any case. So here begins the April 2020 roundup.

Setting up a new telescope is not an easy task. It takes some planning and thought to get the set up right first time. I have made an attempt to plan out everything that I will need before getting started. Using a handy copy of Visio I had lying about I have put together a handful of block level diagrams to help me out. This process gives me an overview of what is needed to make sure that the system is complete and that everything has been thought of, as far as possible. Following is a run through of my plans and my thoughts regarding what issues they raised.

This series of articles will chronicle the process of building a permanent astronomy telescope pier in my garden. A permanent pier makes the setting up process for an night of astrophotography or visual observing far less laborious. This is because the pier is already aligned with the celestial pole, via the North peg on top of the mount adapter. Power and network adapters are immediately to hand, removing the work of laying cables out from the shed and putting them away later after each observing or astrophotography session.

In this article I have a play with PyEphem and our local star, both as an opportunity to draw some pretty graphs and answer a few basic astronomy related questions, such as: what does the equation of time look like and is there a difference in the time it takes for the sun to set during the year.