Dark Frames - Who? What? Where? — by Marko T. on Monday, November 14, 2011

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Everyone aspiring to take some astrophotographs sooner or later will run in to preprocessing and dark frames . There is lots of information...

Scope Alignment — by Marko T. on Sunday, October 9, 2011

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Aligning a traditional GEM without any self alignment capabilities has got to be one of the most difficult things to do properly. Of couse...

Focuser Project — by Marko T. on Tuesday, October 4, 2011

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It's been some time since I last posted and even today the topic is an on going focuser update project. The purpose is to make a crayfor...

Monthly Constellation - Ursae Minoris — by Marko T. on Tuesday, July 12, 2011

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During the light summer months here in the north there is not much observing going on, so I thought I'd start a Monthly Constellation se...

uniMap - A new plate solver+ application in progress — by Marko T. on Wednesday, June 15, 2011

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A few days back when looking for plate solving applications I ran across a work in progress called uniMap . It looks like a promising piece ...

Minding the Heavens - book review — by Marko T. on Monday, June 6, 2011

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In the future I will try to post book reviews on books I've read. At least during the summer time when the nights are so light that obse...

Lyra Targets M57 Ring Nebula and Stephenson 1 Open Cluster — by Marko T. on Monday, May 2, 2011

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The nights are getting quite light at my latitude so this getting to be pretty much the last chance to get any DS photography done before th...

RA Tracking motor modification — by Marko T. on Sunday, May 1, 2011

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To run or not to run. That's the question. That's what my original AstroMaster motor drive decided to ponder during one freezing e...

First Light EOS 1000D part II — by Marko T. on

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Yesterday the sky cleared again and I had chance to continue with the testing of the EOS 1000D. With the moon as a waxing crescent I had a ...

First Light for EOS 1000D — by Marko T. on

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"Santa" was so kind as to bring me a new camera. So, bye, bye to the Canon A530 and welcome EOS 1000D. The time has gone while ...

AstroMaster 130 Spidervane Modification — by Marko T. on

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The spidervane modification has its roots in the results of the startests I performed on the scope. In the diffraction patterns the orig...

Endeavours with comet 103/P Hartley 2 — by Marko T. on

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In the fall of last year northern hemisphere observers had a nice opportunity to observe a bright comet, which was discernible even with ...

Star Testing an AstroMaster 130 — by Marko T. on Wednesday, January 19, 2011

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It all started on a beautiful September evening in 2010. While trying afocal photography with the AstroMaster telescope and a Canon A530 cam...

Greetings — by Marko T. on Sunday, January 16, 2011

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This is my futile attempt to document my endeavours in amateur astronomy. In this blog I can hopefully provide helpful information to others...