The process of restarting a long-dormant hobby

I've been out of astronomy for probably 10 years. Unfortunately I foolishly sold my 15" dob, but I do have a 10" and a 90mm mak and a decent selection of eyepieces.

I've been working for a couple of days renewing my knowledge and getting my equipment back in shape.

On the equipment side, my dob has some rubber parts that have perished and a snapped-off nylon thumb screw. I've got replacements for those in my Amazon cart. The focuser rings have rubber traction rings that have long since fallen apart. I am having trouble finding a source for those, so I'm probably going to just 3D print replacements, maybe make them a bit fatter while I'm at it.

On the software side, I've dragged up the Pro version software I had before - SkyMap 3 Pro and SkyTools 3 Pro. SkyMap is now dead and buried, but there are plenty of available replacements; KStars, Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, etc.

There's no replacement I know of for SkyTools though. After confirming the old version works under WINE/Bottles on my computer (Linux), I spent the $90 for the upgrade to SkyTools 4 and am now working my way through the tutorials. It really is an indispensable piece of software. There may be other software that does what it does, but it's been in constant development (by one guy) for I think close to 20 years. There's something special about a single-developer piece of software written and maintained by someone who is passionate about it. It doesn't gain bloat, it doesn't get subscriptions unnecessarily tacked on to it, it just does what it needs to do.


 

I have a bit of a gap right now since we're still pretty close to full moon, so I have time to learn some stuff.

I also think I'm going to build some kind of a cart that can pick up my dob and roll it around on wheels. I'm getting sick of trying to pick the thing up and waddle around the place with it. I'm thinking some kind of manual forklift with big fat tires for rolling around on the grass. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luminous red nova AT2025abao inadvertently imaged!

Image
I just went back to my 4 hour exposure of M31 taken on October 27 and found the luminous red nova AT2025abao lurking there! It was only discovered 10 days prior to that. Luminous red novas are very rare, they are the result of a merging of two orbiting stars, rather than the end of a star's lifetime, or a cyclic expulsion of stellar "ash" that are the normal kind of nova. I've drawn arrows on these two crops from the original image  Here's a wider image so you can see where to look:  
Read more

Astrophotography

Image
(copied from my DragonflyDIY blog) I have been somewhat interested in astrophotography in the past, but have only done camera-lens wide field stuff with no mount (30 second exposure type stuff). I just wasn't interested in spending the time or money to get into what can be a VERY expensive hobby. However, at this year's Astronomy on the Beach (29th annual, in Island Lake State Park near Brighton, Michigan), I went to a talk about smart telescopes. I had been only vaguely aware of this new phenomenon, and went to the talk very skeptical. Long story short, about 3 days later I laid down $550 for a Dwarf 3 smart telescope. The front runners in the $500 class scopes right now are the Dwarf 3 and the Seestar S50. The Dwarf has a newer generation 8 megapixel imaging chip and a wider field of view. The S50 is more telephoto and has a previous generation 2 megapixel chip. I find that a lot of what I'm interested in are larger objects, and I like the newer chip. Those co...
Read more

Photos from October 20-25, 2025

Image
It's been cloudy almost constantly for the last week or so. I've been reviewing my telescope plans. Short term I really think I want to pick up an SVBony MK127 scope to put on the Explore Scientific mount (I currently have an Orion 90MM on there). My main interest is visual observing, though there is some thought that this scope would be a reasonable platform for imaging smaller objects than the Dwarf 3 can do, should I want to do that in the future. I did manage to collect a few photos by shooting through holes in the clouds. C2025-A6 (Lemmon)       IC 1805 - Heart Nebula The comet I kept short to keep it from blurring as it moves. Six 15-second exposures. The Heart Nebula got 90 exposures, 60 seconds each at 120 gain. The deep sky stuff really would do a lot better with 3 hours or so of exposures but the clouds only stay away for an hour or two at a time. 
Read more