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.

A month ago, 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.

PCB

Here is an image of the SHC PCB, V1.03.

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.

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 27th of January, 2018, I gave a presentation at the KW RASC on Al-Sufi's Book Of Fixed Stars.

The book is the first illustrated pictorial star atlas, and was very influential for centuries after it was authored. It spread widely from central Asia, throughout the Middle East, and to Europe. It was translated into many languages.

Here is the presentation slides, and audio recording: