time to pull the plug

Last year, I picked up a Meade DS-16. It was a large, bulky telescope of early 80s vintage. Using it was like wrestling with a dead elephant; it had a clock drive for tracking RA, but no fine controls at all, so aiming it precisely was very difficult. On top of that, the tube didn’t rotate at all, so it was really easy to get the telescope into impossible positions. When the telescope was pointing south, it was very difficult to look through the eyepiece. I had to stand on a stool and the mount to be able to get a look through it, because using a ladder didn’t help at all (the ladder got me higher, but it didn’t really get me any closer).

This was not an ideal situation, but it was tolerable until the thing fell on me while I was taking it out of the garage. I escaped serious injury, but decided enough was enough. It was time to convert the beast to a Dobsonian that would be easier to use and that I’d be able to take to Mt. Rainier or Mt. St. Helens.

Before

After

Below the fold are more pictures of the Dob at different stages of building, and some discussion of how I built it.

Made a small update to the octopress image popup plugin that I posted about a couple weeks or so ago. The changes are: Thumbnails now go in a thumb/ directory. The plugin no longer generates a new thumbnail if the thumbnail exists and is newer than the original image. Unscaled popups should work better now as well. They aren’t huge changes, but should make it work better. Not regenerating the thumbnail everytime will make generating and previewing easier too, because it was rebuilding everything continuosly because it was making a new thumbnail each time it regenerated.

I had the joy earlier today of having to rewrite a Scout plugin that reports NTP status on a Debian box. The problem was that the plugin depended on the output of ntpstat, and that program isn’t available on Debian or Ubuntu. I didn’t feel that repackaging ntpstat for Debian was the right way to go, so I dug around in ntpq and ntpdc trying to get the same info.

SkySafari, the star chart app I use on my iPhone (and an all around find product, in my experience) has quite a few lists of objects that come with it. Unfortunately, none of them are a list for the Herschel 400. Never fear, though. You can import and export observing lists with SkySafari, and I’ve built one for the Herschel 400. There’s one object that’s left out because it’s a dubious duplicate of another object on the list, and the total objects on the list is a little over 400 because there’s a few objects on the Herschel 400 that have multiple NGC numbers that I included, but other than that it should be accurate.

Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm Tele Vue eyepieces. No ParaCorr this evening. OIII filter. New objects observed: NGC 129, NGC 136, NGC 225, NGC 436, NGC 637, NGC 663, NGC 659, NGC 381, NGC 1501, NGC 1502 Previously viewed objects: NGC 457, NGC 869, NGC 884 Since I only have seven Messier objects left to observe, and none of them are in the sky right now, I’ve started working on the Herschel 400.

Since I’m very close to finishing up observing all the Messier objects (I have seven left at the moment, which I have to wait on getting back into the sky before I can go looking for them), I’ve started looking for more obscure objects, like I did the last time I went out. The sky’s a big place, though, and it can be hard to decide what to look for among the NGC or other catalog objects.

A while back, I came across this Octopress plugin for modal popups for images, which seemed like it’d be really useful, except it only scaled the image down with the browser rather than actually resizing the image. I didn’t like that much, so I never used it.

I have a lot of categories on this blog, particularly for astronomical objects, but I realized that Octopress doesn’t come with a page listing the categories by default. This would be very useful for me, especially as a quick way to look up an object to see if I’ve seen it before, so I installed this categories list plugin for Octopress. This plugin was all well and good for making a list or cloud of all your categories, but there wasn’t anything for ordering the categories by number of posts.

Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55m, 12mm Tele Vue eyepieces. Also looked at M13 & the Veil Nebula through someone else’s telescope. New objects observed: NGC 7335, Stephan’s Quintet (NGC 7317, NGC 7318 (a & b), NGC 7319, NGC 7320), Mayall II, Maffei 1 Previously viewed objects: NGC 7331, Messier 31, Messier 32, Messier 110, NGC 3077, Messier 81, Messier 82, Messier 13, NGC 6960, Messier 45, Messier 33 Location: Sunrise Point, Mt.

Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm Tele Vue eyepieces. New objects observed: Basel 1, NGC 6704, NGC 6712, IC 4665, Collinder 350 Previously viewed objects observed: Messier 11 (Wild Duck Cluster), NGC 7331, Messier 31, Messier 32 The main task this night was looking around for that interesting asterism I remembered seeing a long time ago. I think it’s in the neighborhood of the Wild Duck Cluster, and if so I think I have indeed found it again.