| 2 min
| 265 words
I’m building the Sliced PiFinder, a device to help my telescope find things! Previously, I tried using a cheaper IMU but gave up and bought a $30 fancy chip.
Originally I didn’t want to buy a $50 GPS USB stick but the PiFinder creator found a $10 solderable GPS unit for a v2, so I bought one and soldered it in.
After soldering in the GPS chip, dubiously electrical taping it in place, dropping it and cracking my 3D printed parts, printing new parts, using a soldering iron to remove heat inserts out of the old parts so I can place them into the new parts, printing the case, discovering the case wasn’t designed for my battery and blocks access to the on/off switch and USB ports, melting holes in case with soldering iron, putting on a cover plate over the screen and LEDs… I finally put it on my telescope!
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| 1 min
| 40 words
Perseus double cluster
Equipment used: my 3D printed 4.5" telescope, custom mount, Pico pic-taker button, my phone
I have a raw version of this where some stars are noticeably blue or orange but it has more camera noise than this
| 10 min
| 2107 words
I’m building a PiFinder! It uses a camera to take pictures of the sky, connected to a raspberry pi which uses a database of stars to tell you where in the sky your telescope is pointing. But a PiFinder is $550 new. A stock pifinder uses the newest and most expensive options for pis and cameras, and when I looked at the parts list, I thought: I can build something similar for a fifth of the price!
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| 2 min
| 357 words
The pifinder is a tool to help you aim a telescope. It uses a camera to take pictures of the sky, connected to a raspberry pi which uses a database of stars to tell you where in the sky your telescope is pointing. Then, if you want to find a specific object, it tells you what direction to move your telescope in.
I’m building a janky pifinder with some nonstandard parts: instead of a $60 raspi 4 and $50 HQ camera and $25 lens and $30 IMU, I’m using a $10 lens, a secondhand raspi 3, and a cheap “pi camera module v1” from 2013 that was attached to the raspi, and a $20 IMU with unpronounceable name I found lying around in a drawer of sensors.
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| 1 min
| 54 words
The scoring tool cut a circle fine, but then the next step was supposed to be “press it from the rear side and the crack will deepen”, and it just… Didn’t. Maybe this glass is just too thick? I still have half my countertop left, I need a new way to cut 1/2" glass
| 1 min
| 103 words
The first picture is at 36x zoom, the second one at 150x zoom. The more zoomed in one is fainter because the same light is spread across more area, but you can see the four trapezium stars as four separate streaks!
This was a very frustrating night for photography because finding things in a big sky is hard. Light pollution made it hard to see M31, I couldn’t find M33, and then finally clouds rolled in and it became a race against time to photograph the Orion nebula M42.
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| 1 min
| 143 words
Today in observing I:
Tried to get a photo of the ring nebula through the 6mm lens. Realized my finderscope was misaligned, couldn’t get it aligned in time before it sank below a tree. Tried to get a photo of Jupiter, succeeded! Tried out a new phone app named skeyecam that lets you take many many photos with the same settings, for some reason it made Jupiter green. Then I tried taking a photo of m42 through the 6mm lens, but I couldn’t get anything on camera.
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| 1 min
| 132 words
I got a mirror that’s 2.3 inches wide. However, several weeks ago, I printed a mirror holder that was designed to fit a mirror 2.46 inches wide. Sure, I could just use the bigger holder, but the bigger the secondary holder the more light it blocks from reaching your mirror. Is it worth a smaller secondary mirror holder that will block half a square inch less light? Yes, I decided. So I opened up the model and slightly scaled it down.
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| 1 min
| 133 words
Visiting family in another city, and turns out there’s an astronomy store named La Maison De L’Astronomie (The Astronomy House)! I called them up to see if they had some secondary mirrors in stock… And they did! They had so many big telescopes, way more small refractors than I was expecting, a huge cabinet of binoculars, and some absolutely massive tripod mounts.
The bbastro calculator says the most optimal uniform illumination secondary mirror size is 62.
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| 1 min
| 58 words
I found this with the help of an amateur with a huge telescope and laser pointer so bright it looked like a line pointing into the sky. Looked like a dim circular smudge to the eye. Picture taken with the 25mm eyepiece, so I bet I could get an even better picture through the more zoomed in 6mm