Updating equipment

I planned to update my mount (EQ-6 SynTrek) to better one  for this season. I have been quite satisfied with it but I wanted more accurate one.

I had saved enough to buy one I had in mind. But the same day I was placing an order for that I found another manufacturer's mount with good accuracy and payload and the most important thing, about half the price! So suddenly I had few "extra" Euros to spend...

So today UPS brought me big and heavy Pelican case from U.K (thanks Brian). Inside was HUGE filter wheel (FW8-STL) with eight 50mm filters (Baader's LRGB+HaOiiiSiiHb) and remote quide head.

Behind the wheel is SBIG's STL-11000XM with class0 chip. Camera has large (36mm*24,7mm) chip with 11Mpix (4008*2672).

And now I have to wait about a month for a dark night... First one with astronomical darkness will be 24th of August.

Observatory v2.0

Here's really short update of what have happened since last summer: I decided to make dome as a  "real" dome, not a roll of roof...

So I started to make a Geodesic dome. I made two models, pentagon and hexagon. (here's good calculator: DesertDomes)

These were used as a mold for fiberglass parts. Here's an assembly diagram where you can find these pentagon and hexagon figures:

After making 5 pentagons and 12 hexagons I started to attach them.

And finally a complete dome

And next the shutter system:

And finally:

Here's domes rotation and shutter control box: (lesvedome)

As you can see, I'm not an electrician.... But it's working!!