Photography

The Transit of Venus

June 5, 2012

OK so it looks a lot like a black dot on the face of the sun, but you don’t see it very often… Taken with a Nikon D2X, 300mm zoom lens and a solar filter.

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…conclusive proof of giant space bears on the moon!

March 28, 2012

Shot some footage with a Microsoft Lifecam modified for prime focus on the 16″ Meade Lightbridge – with a 2x Barlow lens. The moon is made of blancmange (apparently)… All the wibbly-wobbly stuff is due to the atmospheric conditions at the time. At 0:09 you can definitely see the paw print of a giant space […]

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…my best Orion Nebula yet.

March 11, 2012

Up til today I thought this was my best Orion Nebula image: Until I got the hang of image stacking, now *this* is the best: A stack of 12 images and 6 dark frames, combined with DeepStackStacker. This is as good as the single image I took at the dark sky site – so it’ll […]

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…Orbital Spex for under a tenner (dollars that is…)

March 10, 2012

Sure, you can buy those centrally-located LED miner’s lamps, but nothing says 90’s geek chic like your very own Orbital glasses. Now you can recreate those halcyon (harr harr) days of almost pitch black gig-ness (“When do Orbital come on?” – “They’ve been playing for the last 10 minutes”) I needed a pair of these […]

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…fixing up the optics in a Meade SN-8 reflector telescope.

February 29, 2012

I got to take the telescope out to a “dark field” site over the weekend – the difference in viewing was amazing. Really clear, and hundreds more stars visible to the naked eye. Managed to get some colo[u]r out of M42 – although it soon became obvious that I had a problem with the focal […]

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Jupiter and Andromeda (again)

February 13, 2012
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It was murderously cold outside last night. But I stayed out long enough to attempt a photograph of Jupiter. This time I had bought a Microsoft Lifecam 1080p webcam, and removed the focusing assembly so that it was just a bare sensor. This was attached to a 2X Barlow lens and installed in my 8″ […]

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Observing Jupiter

September 26, 2010
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Tonight I got to see a real live planet [Well, as live the the time it takes for the light to reach the Earth – Ed]. If you did not know, Jupiter is extremely bright and quite close to us at the moment. So much so, that it’s actually difficult to miss. If you look […]

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Adding a Wide Angle Lens to the Miro Flip HD

September 26, 2010
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I use my Miro Flip Ultra HD to record Youtube movies – but if you’ve ever used one you’ll notice that it has a very narrow field of view – for a while I was holding my Canon wide angle adapter in front of the lens, but I recently found the wide angle kit by […]

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First Light

August 5, 2008

Success! I cleaned out most of the burning from the inside of the coil. Then mounted the toroid back on the secondary with a nylon bolt. I’m also pleased to report that the Tesla tuner I built was pretty much spot on with the tap point of the primary coil…

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Tesla coil – internal arcing of secondary

July 31, 2008

Well, last night I found out why our Tesla coil isn’t delivering the performance I would expect. I opened up the secondary coil and found carbon scoring on the inside of the coil. Looks like the coil has been discharging internally. We need to remove the metal bolt at the top and find a way […]

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