Testing the TK Tar Baby

[TinselKoala]

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[TinselKoala]

An even more sophisticated yet still easy to do routine would involve realtime monitoring of the possibly fluctuating power drawn by the Ainslie circuit, and adjusting the DC circuit's draw to match. This could be easily done with a microcontroller and some peripheral components. I believe I could set up a system to do this realtime monitoring and adjustment using an Arduino, in an afternoon's mild labor.

[TinselKoala]

Last night's moon.

This was taken looking through the Megrez 90, taken off the mount and handheld, to see the crescent low on the horizon peering through the trees.
It's taken with the Canon Xti at 1/30 second at ISO1600 and processed in PixInsightLE from the Canon's .cr2 raw format image.

(Used in this way, with the TeleVue flattener/reducer, the M90 is roughly equivalent to a 600mm telephoto at f/4.8 or so.)

[TinselKoala]

Two nights ago it remained clear enough late for me to get this shot of the Ring Nebula in Lyra, Messier # 57,  still low on the eastern horizon.

This is a beautiful planetary nebula, the remnants of a star blowing off its outer layers in the process of becoming a white dwarf, which can barely be seen dimly at the center of the nebula. The red parts are emissions from ionized hydrogen, shocked by the rapidly expanding cloud of gas. The green is emission from doubly-ionized oxygen (O III). The nebula is about magnitude 9.0, and so can be seen in small telescopes from dark sites fairly easily. It's about 1 arc-minute in apparent diameter, and it's about 2300 light years away.

This was taken with the EdgeHD 9.25 on the CGEM mount, unguided, using the Canon Xti with the Orion Skyglow Imaging filter.  This is a single frame, not stacked, an exposure of 50 seconds at ISO1600, processed in PixInsightLE and gimp.

[evolvingape]

TK, PW,

How about a Dim Bulb Test with an integrated Batt Meter ?

http://www.gorum.ca/batt-cap.html