Weekend woes but one bright spot.

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Saturday: Another horribly wet day but with gales. I went up to check the dome and found some leakage around the edges. Fortunately there were no drips. I thought I might find a long strip of aluminium [flashing?] to make a stand up barrier for the top ring of the octagon. It need only be fixed to the timber ring to stop driving rain from wetting the ring on the windy side. The wind drives the rain under the flexible rubber skirt. Something like 6" [15cm] high should help to reduce the draughts and rain incursion. It would be very much easier than building a truly round skirt for the dome itself. Only a few minutes work too. Such a strip could also be added to the 16 sided flashing to make a continuous, rigid skirt in place of the rubber.

Sunday: Grey overcast with occasional light showers but mild. Trying to observe a blank sun but clear views are few and teasing. I had to dismantle the H-alpha scope to tighten the back plate. Managed it during a long cloudy period. So no views lost.

I'm using a 45° elbow for comfortable views. The elbow's longer glass path,compared to the 90° diagonal allows focusing without messing about with extensions or even a focuser. The sag of the hefty, cantilevered H-a optics housings was moving the whole field of view. So I drilled and screwed all the bits together at the backplate. There was no need for the rotation I had built into the flange.

Stellarium is working properly again after a new download of Stellarium Scope! 👍

I find it too hard to find objects without a magnifying glass in Cartes-Du-Ciel despite the zoom. Even stronger reading glasses don't help. This may be due to my inexperience and having a 4k screen on my laptop. I just miss the realism and clarity of Stellarium's rendition and object identification. I don't think I'm going to see the sun for an hour or two! So I might as well find something more interesting to do than watching clouds through the observation slit.

Now I'm back indoors for lunch the sun has come out! I'm looking forwards to accurate Goto slews to the sun. It is so bright that it is often hard to align a telescope by eye. I'm using the finder by placing my hand behind it. When the sun's image is centered in its shadow then the 7" telescope is too. I just have to remember NOT to look through the finder and to fit the full aperture, Baader foil filter on the 7" before I start.

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