DIY

Building an Observatory 1st Find a Location

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When we moved to Wenatchee in Eastern Washington, the thought was to put an observatory in the yard of wherever our home turned out to be. However, I found there was nearly as much light pollution in our new location as there was at our previous home over on the Seattle side of the Cascades. … Read more

Batteries

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Going remote with your Astrophotography Rig? You’ll need power….  Quite a bit of it.  Most people won’t want to have a generator ruining the peaceful solitude of the night, so battery power is the usual solution. So how much power do you need, what kind of batteries will do, how to connect to them, how … Read more

SBIG Self Guide Cable (Optocoupler)

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I worry a lot. It seems there are a lot of folks that have trouble with hooking up their guider correctly, things not working right, and even damage to the mount and/or camera….  So I worry.   After I got my Losmandy mount with the Gemini controller I reviewed the manual carefully and read lots of … Read more

DIY Scope Heaters

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Ever had your scope objective dew up? Frustration eh? After it happened to me I went shopping for ready made heaters. Well… being frugal (i mean really cheap), I just couldn’t bring myself to part with the money they wanted for the heaters. So…. I looked for ways to do it myself. The solution I … Read more

A 50mm Finder as a Guidescope

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Back in April 2009 I wanted to have a more portable system using a more lightweight mount. thus reducing the weight of the imaging gear is a good thing. I’d seen in the forums on Cloudynights.com that some folks were using 50mm finder scopes as guiders. I decided I had to try modifying one myself. … Read more