Today the CEO of NTE Poole Ltd. Eric Kennedy – brought me the all Aluminium pier for the mini-WASP!  The usual beautiful craftsmanship and Aluminium-welding which are the hallmarks of NTE Poole Ltd.  The wall thickness of that vertical tube is 1″  I am expecting great stability from the new mini-WASP array as the concrete block that this pier will sit on will go 6 feet into the ground, with 1 foot above ground, and as you can see from the pier base – the block will be 2 foot by 2 foot in cross-section.  Now if that lot is not rock-solid with the array sitting on top, I don’t know what more I could have done.  There will also be strengthening rods bashed into the ground that the concrete will be poured around for extra strength and stability.  So what does the Paramount look like on top of this piece of art?

I have a new all-Aluminium connector designed and built for connecting an SXM26C (or H18 mono) CCD at the correct metal-back distance to the focal reducer on the Sky 90 refractor.  I am just getting a further 3 of these custom-built connectors made so I have one for each of the 4 x Sky 90 scopes.  Each connector has an internal thread for a 2″ filter – and the maximum possible aperture has been used throughout the connector to reduce (hopefully to zero) the slight vignetting I used to see on the old system.  Also Eric Kennedy (NTE Poole Ltd.) will be delivering the all-aluminium custom-built pier for the Paramount ME very shortly.  Next stage in the process will be the concrete support for the pier, the surrounding wooden decking, and finally the larger fibreglass dome to house the beast.  Hopefully this latter part of the project should be completed by end of June 2010.

Great day today (no – not the weather!) – put the side panels on the mini-WASP array, and Brian May sent me a copy of his new book “A Village Lost & Found”.  This is a beautiful publication and you can see the attention to detail that has gone into every part of creating this book.  Wonderful job Brian – well done – would make the Thesis look like an almost trivial exercise by comparison

With the side panels now on, it’s a matter of getting the second observatory built and buying the cameras for the two Sky 90s and the guide scope.

To load up the Sky 90s

I bolted the mini-WASP telescope frame to the Paramount versa-plate to get a feel what the finished system will look like.  The funny-looking device sticking out the front of the frame is a counterbalance arm for the weight of all the equipment that will sit on the back of the telescopes.  I have left the two side panels off in this photo.  I have also left out the 2 Sky 90s from the bottom pair of holes as I need to remove the Robofocus units from them before fitting to the frame – I might do this tomorrow and update the photos.  The two holes at the top are for 2 x FSQ106 telescopes to be bought at some future (unknown) date, and these will be used for narrowband imaging.

This is going to be some beast to set up prior to an imaging run and I’m glad I didn’t make provision for any more telescopes as I don’t think it would be viable to get them all sorted without losing a lot of good imaging time per session.

The modifications to the telescope frame have been carried out and I’ve just bolted all the furniture to it to check it all hangs together properly – fortunately, it does.  The two open sides of the frame have now been covered by 8mm Aluminium sheet to further strengthen the frame and hopefully this will prevent any flexure in the frame itself.  The top plate has been drilled and tapped to take both a finder scope and the main guide scope (Megrez 80mm) which is held in scope rings.  Finally the bottom plate has been drilled so that the telescope frame can bolt directly to the Paramount’s versa-plate.  I have removed the Losmandy dovetail plate completely from the baseplate so there is no chance of flexure at that particular point on the frame.

I have just posted plans for the new all Aluminium pier for this project to Eric at NTE Poole, so hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll have another critical component delivered to the NFO ready for initial assembly of the system.

Nigel Ball kindly sent me a link to a KVM switch (something I’d not heard of before) which looks like the perfect solution to my mini-WASP computer array problem.  One keyboard, mouse and monitor can be shared amongst 4 computers!  Looks like just the job – unless someone out there tells me otherwise.

I have just spent the WHOLE of today resurrecting an old computer which will be the main computer for the mini-WASP array.  Lots of silly little things have fought back hard and it’s only just started to give in now at 9:30 p.m.  It’s only a 1.12GHz Athlon with 1GB of memory, but it has XP Pro, 2 serial ports, a parallel port, and a load of USB ports on the back.  The Robofocus wants a serial port, the mount wants a serial (or USB) port, and the Starlight Xpress cameras which use a USB port don’t want to see anything on any of the other USB ports – so it will end up being one computer per imaging camera.  Unfortunately as each camera (on each of the 4 imaging scopes) will also need a serial port (for the Robofocus) it will mean 4 PCs altogether as laptops don’t seem to come with serial ports nowadays.  So it’s going to be quite a pain (computer-wise) to get the whole mini-WASP array working together as a single system.  I also only want one keyboard, mouse and screen of course due to the space limitations in the observatory.  So I might end up connecting the 4 PCs together via the LAN ports (and a hub) and using the main computer that I’ve resurrected today to “remote desktop” the three satellite computers – unless anyone out there has a better/more efficient way of doing this.

I have just unpacked the beast – it is the most solid piece of engineering I’ve come across in the field of astronomy – I just hope I can put it to full use.  I think a fully-loaded mini-WASP head will come in around 80 or 90 pounds, which is well within the capabilities of this mount and should hopefully ensure long life – provided I balance it all up nicely.  And therein lies a mod to the refractor mounting frame, I’ll be adding a counterweight bar (and weights) to the front of the frame to balance out all the equipment that will be hanging off the back.  Next job is to get the frame into the workshop for the mods.

UPS have just delivered the Paramount   Will now unpack – taking piccies as I go.  It’s come all the way from Germany!!