Onehouse Observatory
Astronomical images by Kieron Heard
Site
The observatory is sited in Onehouse, a village just outside the town of Stowmarket in Suffolk, UK. This is a semi-rural location with a reasonably dark sky, having a naked-eye limiting magnitude of 5. Seeing conditions are seldom better than average, or 3 on the Antoniadi scale.
Observatory
The Onehouse Observatory became operational on New Year's Eve 2002. It is of timber construction, being a modified garden shed measuring 7 x 7 feet. It has an apex roof consisting of two, hinged panels that are opened manually. This is a relatively unusual design, but it has obvious advantages over the more common 'roll-off' roof on a site where space is limited. Click here for an account of how the observatory was built.
Equipment
Originally the observatory housed a Helios Evostar 150mm, achromatic refractor (f/8). This has been replaced by an Orion Optics OMC200 - a Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope of 200mm diameter and 4000mm focal length (f/20). The OMC200 is on a Vixen Super Polaris equatorial mount, supported on a concrete pillar. A Takahashi FS-60C apochromatic refractor (60mm, F355mm, f/5.9) is used as a portable instrument. Usually it is carried on an EQ3-2 equatorial mount and tripod, but also can be mounted on a camera tripod fitted with a Manfrotto video head.
Image capture is by means of a Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera and a Philips ToUcam Pro webcam. The CP4500 is used for wide-field, deep-sky shots, and full disk images of the Sun and Moon. It is coupled to the telescopes afocally using ScopeTronix WA 14mm and WA 18mm eyepiece/adapters. Images are previewed and focused on a PC monitor using the freeware program Hocus Focus and the camera is controlled remotely with another piece of freeware, TheForce. The ToUcam is used primarily for planetary imaging and close-up images of the Sun and Moon. It is attached at the prime focus of the telescopes and is operated through the PC software K3CCDTools. Image stacking is done with the freeware program RegiStax.
This page was updated last on 17 January 2008