On to the Back-burner with ye!!

So, turns out that manipulating many images, rescaling rotating and moving squillions of moon fragments all at once is rather RAM intensive. Or at least it was with GIMP. Several evenings of 100% memory usage for "this program is not responding" later and Operation Sandra Voi is not looking very healthy. That and the fact that I now have a new set of eyepieces with focal lengths greater than 10mm (which means I can see and image the whole moon at once), means that I shall suspend the project until I can image through the telescope slightly more reliably.

Astronomy has not ended for the moment, Saturn is coming up at the moment which is looking very nice, and I have started looking for some of the Messier objects. Of course they are all far too dim to be photographed, so no nice images.

Anyway, onward to the next crazy project!

The telescope continues...

Soooo - I may have built another telescope and not documented the process at all. Which is a bit of a problem as I now have a folder full of CAD files with really odd, but meaningful, names (like: "SlottyThings.ipt", why did my past self do this to me!). Luckily I have some nice work in progress photos, even if my in depth description may be a bit lacking.

The telescope is a 76mm Newtonian reflector with a potentially equatorial mount. The optical tube, and mount were built using the university laser cutter. Unfortunately I am not yet skilled enough to make the mirrors, mirror cell, tripod or eyepiece myself, so they had to be purchased/scrounged.

The optical tube with the two cheaty elements, the secondary holder and the primary cell. I like the fact that it looks like a big ray gun!

Tube clad in a sheet of black fabric to guard against light pollution, with two points of interest. One, the photo is from before the final mount was assembled so the telescope is attached straight onto the tripod. This was way too shakey and has not been done since. Additionally, you can see the £5 telescope in the bottom right corner! Safe to say the new telescope is incomparably better.

Drama shot, now with proper mount. There have been a couple of modifications since this photo to stiffen up the mount and tripod, but essentially the telescope still looks like this.

Of course no project would be complete without an even more ambitious project to follow it. Thus, "Operation Sandra Voi", the plan is to produce a mosaic image of the moon by stitching together lots of smaller images. My eyepiece's field of view is quite limited, so this is the only way I can produce a complete picture of the moon, and hopefully it will look really good when it is done: I can always go back and re-image sections that are either incomplete or of poor quality after a first pass.

"Sandra Voi" is named after one of the lighthuggers from Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series, only mentioned in passing a couple of times, it is an exploration ship just as hopefully the project will help me explore astronomy (ha ha, maybe I should have come up with a cool acronym instead). The naming scheme does leave me with a bit of a problem as I haven't thought of a cool enough project to call "Operation Nostalgia for Infinity" yet...

Photo, apologies for any confusion, due to the optics of the telescope the image is flipped, I also have no idea about the rotational orientation! I am fairly sure that it is the boundary between the Mare Serenitatis and Mare Imbrium, with a fairly faint Copernicus crater at the top of the image.

Preliminary mosaic with a nice template in the background kindly provided by good 'ol NASA.