This week, I have been mostly working on...

…conclusive proof of giant space bears on the moon!

Stephen Hobley — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:18:34 +0000

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 bear on the far left – next to the crater with the bump in the middle – or to give it’s proper name Cratère Avec Une Bosse Dans Le Milieu.Similar Posts:

Anyone know what these things are…?

Stephen Hobley — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:01:06 +0000

We helped out set up a science room for a local school. Most of the things we found had an obvious function, but we were unable to figure out a couple things. Anyone got any idea what these do?

(…nothing to do with Harry Potter…)

(The patent search didn’t really turn anything up…)

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…my best Orion Nebula yet.

Stephen Hobley — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:17:49 +0000

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 be pretty cool to go back there and apply these new techniques.

“I’m the moon”Similar Posts:

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

Stephen Hobley — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 21:32:45 +0000

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 (to be later retrofitted with red LEDs) for my late night astrophotography sessions, so last time I was in Harbor Freight I picked up a pair of $5 safety glasses and some LED finger lights ($1.99 each)

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With a deft flick of the wrist you can pop out the lenses (Made in China) leaving you with the perfect transport for the LED side lights.

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The lights come with velcro that does the job, but a rubber band or two (black, of course) wouldn’t hurt.

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And there you go…

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Shaving your head is entirely optional…
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…fixing up the optics in a Meade SN-8 reflector telescope.

Stephen Hobley — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 03:38:11 +0000

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 plane on my camera.

After a quick strip down and rebuild of the optical tube, things were much better – although this image had to be shot through a light pollution filter – hence the green image.

More info on collimation here and hereSimilar Posts:

Jupiter and Andromeda (again)

Stephen Hobley — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:16:44 +0000

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″ reflector telescope.

Jupiter is pretty easy to spot, it comes out early, and is one of the brightest lights in the sky right now. I took 500 shots with the webcam and wxAstroCapture. These were then “stacked” in Registax to get the final image. It actually came out a bit on the red side.

Pulling focus is tricky, the higher the magnification, the more “fuzzy” the image becomes. I’ve added a powered focus to deal with the shaking when turning the dial manually.

But this is an improvement on the image I got a few years ago…

I also had another go at photographing the Andromeda galaxy – I’m getting pretty good at locating this just by sight now. The moon was down this time and so the sky was a little darker. You can just about make out the spiral dust trails, but the light pollution is proving too much to get a decent shot.

The image on top was taken from the excellent freeware ‘Stellarium’ package, available from here – http://www.stellarium.org

Living in a major city that’s about as good an image the light pollution will let you get – I’ll have to try the Orion Nebula with the webcam, see if I can get a better image than last time. Gonna have to schedule a trip out west to a real dark sky site soon…
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…observing the Orion Nebula

Stephen Hobley — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:56:36 +0000

Last night was a pretty cool night for astronomy (both figuratively and literally) – there was a great deal of stuff visible, and since I traded my old iPhone for one of the new Droids I was able to take advantage of Google Sky* and some of the other location apps to find interesting stuff to look at.

I was able to locate the M42 Orion Nebula in the sword of Orion – and got a pretty good view of it too. At first glance you think it’s a local cloud, but after a quick check with Google images I was able to confirm that it was in fact a cloud, one that was over 1300 light years away and about 24 light years wide.

It’s always exciting to see live images, rather then photographs, or digital files – gives you a sense of connection (even though what I saw was how the nebula looked in 700 AD.)

Here’s how it looked through the scope – this is not my image of course, but it was borrowed from Google images and the site http://www.weasner.com/co/Photos/Photos.html

A few years ago I got to see Jupiter too…

* Yes fanboys I know you can run Sky on newer iPhones, just not on my old one.

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Hey, it’s been awfully quiet around here…

Stephen Hobley — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:26:04 +0000

Yes it has, during the run up to Christmas things get a bit crazy in the Hobley household. That’s not to say I’ve not been very busy on the CNC router, but mainly producing presents and other festive stuff.

I have been working on a tip-top secret project featuring the Ebow-clone I put together in the last post – but this is quite a way off just yet.

I was invited by my buddies at Make to put together a Christmas gift guide, and so rather than go for glitz and glamo[u]r I decided to go for the 10 most practical Maker tools I’ve used in 2011…Similar Posts:

…infringing patents (probably)

Stephen Hobley — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:12:09 +0000

I’ve been meaning to build one of these for ages.
Can anyone guess what it is?

It’s not a Taser, or one of those shocking buzzer things – the clue is that the coils are well “potted” and have very different gauges of wire.

Answers on a postcard please, or in the comments…

UPDATE : Correctly identified as a “guitar sustainerizer” otherwise known as an Ebow.

The circuit is a simple audio amplifier based on the LM386 (or in my case the NTE823) IC.

The two coils are taken from old telephone pickups – one (input) has a small rare earth magnet on the back, the other (output) was unwound and rewound with about 300 turns of #32 wire – this coil now has a resistance of just under 8 ohms. I tried a 4 ohm output coil, but the IC got too hot so I doubled the turns.

Note – I recently found a better candidate to make the coils with – tiny PC speakers.

The input coil has a resistance of 250 ohms – this is probably too high – I read somewhere that 50 ohms is probably better – so I may remove some of the turns on the coil.

Tomorrow I’ll publish the circuit and the etch mask, along with a video of the device in action.

…and here’s the patent

UPDATE2 : Here’s the schematic, placement and etch mask – click to enlarge

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…Treasure Finder for MAKE:Projects

Stephen Hobley — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 20:51:41 +0000

This was my favo[u]rite of all the MAKE projects I’ve been working on.

This project uses 2 oscillators in a configuration very much like a Theremin to create a beat frequency (BFO) metal detector.

Range is a few inches for the smaller detection coil, but the detection range can be increased by adding a larger coil.

What I really liked about this project was how the oscillator coil is tuned – using a brass nut on a PVC sleeve.

Full build instructions can be found here…

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