nakbrooks

It would avoid a bit of confusion if the power capacity were stated in Watts (which is the correct SI unit). Amps is only meaningful if the voltage is also stated. 2 amps at 12v is only 24 watts, whereas at 230v it is 460 watts. It would certainly be useful if ASA published the maximum capacity of each of the mount circuits.

Seems sensible Matts. I agree with the concept of building the software stack bottom-up and testing as you go. Nigel

Starting from a clean install of Windows 7, is there a recommended order in which I should install the following software to maximise interoperability: ASCOM platform ACP Autoslew Maxim DL MaxPoint Pinpoint The SkyX In particular, is it best to install Autoslew and get the mount working and aligned before installing ASCOM and ACP? Eventually I want ACP to control everything. Thanks Nigel

ASA 400mm reflector, DDM85 mount and DDM85XL pier delivered to the observatory site today. Conversation with my wife went something along the following lines: Wife: Wow, that's big, when will we get to look through it? Me: You don't look through it. It's for astrophotography, astrometry and possibly some spectroscopy. You use a camera. Wife: You mean you can't actually look at the stars through it? Me: No, at least not without me taking a load of equipment off it. Wife: But if you only want to look at photos of stars there's loads on the Internet, and I bet the quality will be a lot better than yours! Me: [mumbles something about lifelong learning and hoping to contribute to science] Wife: How much did it cost? Me: [quickly changing the subject] But it will be totally robotic, it will work automatically - I won't have to spend the nights outside anymore. Wife: So you won't even take the photos yourself, it does it all itself! How much did you say it cost? Me: Do you fancy eating out tonight?

Thanks Ian. I suspect MSSE probably is sufficient for my needs. The observatory PC will not have a mail client installed (it is dedicated to observatory use only) so the only real exposure is to external penetration, which hopefully my Sonicwall firewall can control. Interesting you use MSSE exclusively - I've always doubted its anti-virus/Trojan capabilities a bit, but maybe Microsoft have improved its comprehensiveness now. I use Symantec on my business PCs and Norton on my home PCs (the latter mainly because of the massive amounts of malware that teenage children seem to inadvertently download!).

Can anyone tell me if I am likely to have issues with installing Norton Internet Security on a PC dedicated to running ASCOM platform, ACP, Autoslew, Maxim DL, MaxPoint and Pinpoint, all under Windows 7 32-bit? This is for an unattended robotic observatory. I know a virus checker adds an additional potential point of failure, but as a matter of principle I'd prefer to install one if there are no known issues, particularly as the PC will be connected to the Internet (albeit through a Sonicwall hardware firewall). Thanks Nigel

Thanks again Bernd. Food for thought!

One other thought. You will see from this CAD drawing (http://forum.astrosysteme.com/index.php?/gallery/image/33-02-cad-internal/) that there is a heavy steel ring that supports the dome. Maybe I could use this as a lightning conductor would that work if it were bonded to a conducting stake in the ground (soil is heavy clay). I will also ask my electrician for advice.

Thanks again Bernd. There are copper data cables to the main building from the observatory (two Cat6 shielded cables) but these also go underground. For the mast, I plan to add surge suppressors to the PoE cables to the camera and Boltwood; I'm not sure about the Unihedron - surge suppression may be built-in to the controller box, I need to check. I need to think about lightning conductors. Adding one to the dome may be difficult (how do I ground it with the dome rotating)? Maybe I could add one to the mast which is only 3 metres away from the dome? On the other hand, I wonder whether a lightning conductor may actually attract lightning to the observatory area and cause more problems than it solves? There are tall trees within 50m and a building within 100m which are probably more likely to attract lightning than the dome which is only 3.7m high and the mast which is only 3.5m high. I will ask around in the village. I think the church (400m away) has a lightning conductor but I don't think any other buildings in the village have, so I will see what problems they have had in the past. Thanks again. Nigel

Thanks Bernd for that very comprehensive reply, it will take me time to digest it. The dome is glass fibre and located about 100m from the nearest building. All the cables to the dome are underground. Inside the dome all cables are inside steel protection (either the cabinets or the pier). The connections between the cabinets and the pier are underground. All of the power supplies are industrial (Siemens SITOP) well-regulated units with adjustable output to permit compensation for voltage loss if necessary. All PSUs will be separately protected with circuit breakers. There are some drawings and pictures in the photos section of the forum if you are interested. I will go through your notes in detail but it looks like I should bond everything together and ground it. Thanks again. Nigel

[edited to make my question a bit clearer] A bit of advice please concerning bonding and grounding. I will be mounting the various observatory equipment (computer, DC power supplies, etc) in two steel cabinets near the pier. The pier itself is a steel DDM85K equatorial pier (for a DDM85XL mount). (1) I intend to electrically bond the two cabinets and their doors to each other. Should I also bond the pier to the cabinets to make sure that everything that the equipment is mounted on is at the same potential? (2) Should I then ground the bonded cabinets/pier (by connection to the ground conductor of the main electrical supply to the building). They will already be imperfectly grounded as they will be bolted to the concrete observatory floor so I'm not sure if grounding them to the building ground conductor makes a ground loop more or less of a problem. Thanks Nigel

A wiki would be ideal if ASA have the time to set one up.

I have no idea whether it works or is any good but this product claims to be able to download Yahoo Groups message threads: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pgoffline.html Depending upon the format you end up with I guess it should be relatively simple to write a program to parse the files and re-upload them here. I presume there are other similar products around but I haven't searched for them.

OK, I've answered my own question. This website gives the time of local noon for any geographic location: http://www.solar-noon.com/ Nigel

I will need to align my DDM85K pier to within a few degrees of North before I can install the mount and OTA to do a proper alignment. I need an easy way of finding North for the pier that is more accurate than a standard compass and was proposing to use the sun's shadow at local noon. Can anyone tell me the formula to calculate the precise time of day (UTC) at which the shadow cast by a vertical pole will point directly North, given the location (lat/long) of the pole? Thanks Nigel

OK. Makes sense!

I was thinking of an area where we could ask questions about how the forum works. For example, I notice that in the members list the icon at the right for sending private messages isn't there against my name. I must have set an option to prevent PMs but can't find how to unset it. Just useful to have somewhere to ask questions like that.

Could I suggest a forum area for questions about how to use the forum?

Hi all. Firstly just to say I am very impressed with the forum software - don't know if it is a commercial package or developed by ASA themselves. I live in Wiltshire in England but also have a property in the Hautes-Pyrenees region of France (just north east of Tarbes) where the skies are a lot clearer than Wiltshire most of the time! Pressure of work has limited my astronomy in recent years but having sold my business I am now retired and able to give myself a major retirement present in the form of a permanent observatory with largely ASA equipment, replacing my old Meade LX90. I hope to spend many happy hours getting it all working and doing some serious astrophotography and photometry. More details of the observatory are in my profile, and I'm adding a photo record of its construction to my gallery. My ASA kit gets delivered in June and I will be commissioning it throughout July, so experienced members of the forum can expect a lot of questions around then !