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Setting up an ASCOM driver project
What follows is simply a step-by-step guide to setting up an ASCOM driver project with Visual Studio 2019 – mainly so that I don’t forget how to do it myself… Creating from an ASCOM template Install ASCOM and developer components. Start Visual Studio as admin Click on ‘Create a new project’ Search for ‘ascom’ in…
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Building an inexpensive lux meter for the observatory…
As part of an environmental monitoring system for an observatory, I wanted to include a measure of ambient light. Ostensibly, this is for safety reasons. However, I must admit that I really just want to see if I can (coarsely) measure sky brightness. There are a number of inexpensive light sensors available from AliExpress/Amazon. The…
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How to find stellar magnitude limit – A bit of a hack
Finding the stellar magnitude limit in an image is not necessarily as straightforward as it, at first, appears. I needed to come up with some non-hand-wavy numbers and thought, ‘No problem, this is easy.’ It turns out that I was wrong. At least for my imagery and what I wanted to say about it. The…
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Cloud monitor MKII (now with POE!)
After building the Mark I cloud monitor, I realized that I really wanted something with power-over-ethernet (POE). The cheap network adapters that I use typically have an HR911105 (or similar) RJ45 connector which is not compatible with POE. I’ve looked but have yet to find any of these adapters with POE, so I decided to…
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Building a network-connected cloud sensor (MKI)
I’ve wanted to build a cloud sensor for years now, but never actually found the time to do it. So, after seeing IR sensors for something on the order of $5 a piece, I ordered a couple and thought that I’d give it a shot. This has undoubtedly been done by lots of other people,…
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A 3D printed Ronchi tester
The situation was that there were three telescopes. Each with the same 20″ cellular mirrors but one with a slightly different cell than the other two. Two were easy to collimate while the third one could never be fully collimated. It appeared that there was a bit of astigmatism that was preventing easy collimation. So,…
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A cheap, low-light IP finder ‘scope’
My academic work focuses on meteors. Visual (and sometimes radar) observations of faint meteors. For this, the general requirement is a sensitive video-rate camera with a moderate field-of-view. The traditional solution (after eyes, photograpic plates, vidicon, etc. ) was to use an analogue security camera with low-light sensitivity. For many years, this was the Watec…
Astro/Geo/Data