After coming back from a week away in the country (about 4 hours drive from here), I really need/want to relocate there.

Not only is the place so much quieter, the air fresher and cleaner and the skies are a Bortle 1 or 2. (Bortle 1 is the darkest you can have.)

House prices are what I would call reasonable, although the cost of everyday items like food and petrol are significantly higher than here. Swings and roundabouts, as they say…

At last, I have a ‘real’ telescope to use for astrophotography.

It’s a second-hand (but near new) Sky Watcher EvoStar 72ED, with all the necessary bits and bobs to attach the DSLR to it.

I’ve had it out once already (although the sky quality was rather underwhelming) and I can’t wait to get it somewhere really dark and put it through it’s paces.

Since the picture was taken I’ve moved the lower ring closer to the camera / focuser to minimise vibration.

A long overdue update and addition of my latest sets of astro images, along with photos of Hatsune Miku.

I could rave about the quality of the T2M resin figurines. I’ll ask you to take my word for it when I say that they are a joy to work with - the resin cuts and carves like butter, there are no air bubbles or surface defects, and the detail is wonderfully sharp.

OK, so I bought myself a PoleMaster camera to help with getting my Star Adventurer polar aligned a bit better.

Good news:

• It works well
• It works with Windows, macOS and Android (once you find the Android software)

Bad news:

• The Android software is a steaming pile of crap. Slow, unresponsive, difficult to use.
• I’ll need to buy a laptop to get the most out of it, and for what I am currently doing, that’s really overkill.

So it will sit in the gear case until such time as I get a telescope and a proper go-to mount, and I have all the electronics gear that require the laptop to function.

Well, I found out why the light pollution filter was giving my images a green / blue bias.

The filter chops out pretty much all the yellow / orange spectrum. Which is not good, as that also chops out a lot of the visible star colours.

So what do I do?

Do I remove the filter and swear at all the light pollution (and faff around in post-processing to try and get rid of it) or do I leave it in and have images with a disappointing blue / green cast?

I have no idea who has been doing the ‘Rain Dance’. Whoever you are, please stop.

More astro imaging done, this time from the coast. A shame we’re on the wrong side of Melbourne to get good images of Orion and The Pleiades, maybe another trip in a different direction when the weather is good again.

There’s also the December Geminids Meteor Shower coming soon, so we’ll be out for a crack at imaging that! Hopefully the moon will be out of the sky and we have a better night than we did last year!

What can I say? Being locked down (yet again) to try and contain the spread of CV19 sucks.

Melbourne now holds the world record for the ‘most locked down city in the world’. We’ve beaten London, and left every other city floundering in the dust.

Which is not something to be proud of, not in the slightest.

Well, that was a bit quicker than anticipated.

The server rebuild has been completed and both machines are up and running perfectly. I still have a few things to finish off before I am completely happy with things - but this is ‘The Way of The Nerd’. There’s always one more thing to work on or improve…

Now to wait for the Internet to be connected and update everything!

I have resurrected my old server from the digital scrap yard and installed Devuan Linux on it. So far it runs quite well, and seems to be more than adequate to function as a Pi-Hole (DNS advertising and tracking blockhole) server.

This means I can separate the functionality out to two devices, and get away from the awful hack I have in place to run Pi-Hole and this blog on the one device.