Astronomy

This is a short video demonstrating how to use a Hall Effect sensor and a magnet to implement Periodic Error Correction (PEC).

Here is an example on eBay for a standalone 3144 Hall Effect Sensor. And here are the small neodymium magnets.

This is a time lapse video of Comet Iwamoto C/2018 Y1, on February 22nd 2019, racing against the background stars of the skies. Note that the comet occults two stars during this video. This is a composite of 51 exposures of 60 seconds each, at ISO 800. Taken using a Celestron C8 with a 0.6X reducer on a Vixen SXD mount running OnStep, and a Canon T4i DSLR.

This is a composite video of Comet 46/P Wirtanen done from 41 exposures of 30 seconds each.

They were taken on 2019-12-19, using a Vixen SXD mount converted to OnStep, a Celestron C8 with 0.6X reducer, and a Canon T4i DSLR. You can see the comet racing against the background stars.

An Artificial Star is a point source of light. It is used to simulate a real star indoors, so you can collimate your telescope's optics indoors and/or during daylight.

Commercial artificial stars, such as this Hubble Optics one, cost $25 or more, and their main feature is a small plate that has precision holes of 50 micron up to 250 microns.

You can make your own artificial star, which is very close in function to the commercial ones.

You can watch this short 4 minute video on how I did it, and read on for detailed instructions.

In December 2018, Dave Schwartz completed a design for a Smart Hand Controller (SHC) for the OnStep open source telescope controller.

After completing the hardware, I ported the firmware for it, from the Teensy 3.x to the lower cost ESP32.

Here is a video that I did demonstrating the features.

After nine months of modifying the OnStep open source telescope controller to run on the cheap STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, it is time to reap the fruits of this long labour: I have an OnStep powered mount ...

A while back, I completed a port of the open source OnStep Telescope Controller firmware to the STM32 Blue Pill ARM Cortex M3 32-bit MCU. Later, Dave Schwartz and myself designed a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that makes building a controller a far easier task than before.

Here is a video of the completed PCB.

Over the winter, I worked with Howard Dutton, the author of OnStep Telescope Controller, to make it work with the low cost STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontrollers. This involved writing a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), so adding different architectures in the future would not be too hard, as it was.

On Friday 11th of May, 2018, I gave the second part of my presentation on Islamic Astronomy's Legacy in Arabic Origin Of Modern Star Names. This was for the KW RASC.

Topics include

On Friday 13th of April, 2018, I gave a presentation at the KW RASC on Medieval Islamic Astronomy and its influence on Renaissance Europe.

Topics include