I’ve been wanting a new telescope for quite some time now. The focal length on the SW72ED is great for wide-frame work and covers the large DSOs very well. For the smaller, more distance objects it wasn’t quite so great.

I was looking at a couple of imaging telescopes with a longer focal length. First was the Apertura CarbonStar 150 - a newtonian reflector with an aperture of 150mm and a focal ratio around 4, giving a focal length of 600mm. Second was the Askar 102mm refractor, a doublet with an aperture of 102mm and a focal length of just over 700mm.

If you’re a regular visitor here, you may be wondering where all the plastic model kit pages have gone to.

I’ve removed them because I wasn’t updating them and they were distracting me from the core reason for this site to exist - my astrophotography.

They might come back one day, but don’t go holding your breath waiting…

The 1000mm lens now has auto-focus

It’s been a very slow process getting here. Not helped in the slightest by my procrastination and putting it off for months and months.

When I bought the Megalens, almost a year ago, I intended to use it for astrophotography. I tried it once and discovered that it was almost impossible to focus manually, even during the daytime, and the stars in the corner of the image had massive distortions - they looked more like birds in flight or the letter ‘V’. (Not to mention the insane amount of vignetting!)

For a very long time, I’ve been pondering the idea of getting a longer focal length telescope for my astro imaging. The SW72ED is a great scope for the imaging I do and my current skill levels. There have been times when it’s 420mm focal length was too short for the target I wanted to capture.

I’ve seen some 500mm ‘mirror’ lenses on eBay selling for a couple of hundred dollars. I’ve always been put off by the fact that they don’t have a standard Nikon mount, and seemed too cheap to give good results. I was also put off by the (relatively slow) F-ratios of F8 or F11.

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days up at Lake Tyrell in Victoria’s north.

It was gorgeous up there, and I came to realise a few things.

• After spending days in a landscape so flat you can see the curvature of the Earth, under a giant bowl of blue sky, I hate the crammed-down and shoehorned-into-a-box feeling that being in the city gives me

• After days of near silence where the only sounds are the distant rumble of the trucks on the highway, bird song and the noise of the wind through the trees, I hate the constant and never-ending hubbub of the city

Nothing else I can add to this, really…

I recently purchased a ZWO ASI183MC astrophotography camera. I won’t bore you with all the technical details nor spout about how much of an improvement it is over my DSLR. (Oddly enough, if you search for my DSLR on various astro forums you will have ’experts’ spouting off about how rubbish it is for astro and that Nikon’s quality control team should be shot for releasing it. I’ve never had problems with it and it’s created images I am very happy with, so I’m of the opinion these Internet ’experts’ are just full of crap.)

We’re past the equinox, so the days are now longer than the nights. Daylight saving just kicked in, so all our clocks jumped forwards an hour. (Don’t get me started on the stupidity that is daylight saving. Remember - they implemented it so that workers in the armaments factories during World War I would have more daylight to work by.)

I’ve been waiting on better weather for about a month now, since my trip to the Dark Sky Site in August. The September new-moon weekend was washed out, and the weather has been generally poor.

After the power problems I faced at the dark sky site, I decided that a ‘proper’ power distribution setup was required. Easy, right?

Nope.

There are plenty of commercial offerings out there - software controlled power distribution boxes with in-built USB hubs and other fancy widgets. Cheap? Oh no, most certainly not.

So I ended up making my own - some DC power sockets, plugs, wire, and a small plastic box to cram it all into. It’s not pretty but it works. I contemplated fitting fuses as a safety measure, and I still think I should, just in case. Maybe they can go into v2 of this thing.

I did an OS upgrade yesterday. Now the graphics tool I use to rescale and add the watermark to images is acting up. I suspect that I may have to downgrade the OS (never a fun task) and hope that fixes the issue.

But then - I did the upgrade to close various exploitable security holes.

Do I convert my images one at a time (and force-kill the program after each one) or do I increase the possibility of getting my computer compromised?