Getting a good truss system together is hard. The carbon fibre rods have to be held rigidly, but they also have to be able to change the angle they’re sitting at. These truss blocks and ball joints do all that.
Astroworx
The first Astroworx telescope is now on the website
Most of you already know that Sidereal Trading is the home of Astroworx, the only telescope factory in Australia. Over the past few years, we’ve been making Newtonian astrographs, developing…
Read MoreWhat is retrograde motion in a planet?
Every month, I present a talk at the Astronomical Society of Victoria on what’s up in the sky. They’re uploaded to YouTube and a few other video sites, and I…
Read MoreImaging galaxies using Hydrogen Alpha
Taking monochrome images of a galaxy in red, green and blue light allows you to make a full colour image, in a similar way to your eyes detecting the three colours and your brain combining them in the colour image. But you add exposures taken through a Hydrogen alpha filter, which draws out emission nebulas in the galaxy.
Catching a Lunar Eclipse using a remote facility
For the Lunar Eclipse of September 2025, Bill used a remote facility that Sidereal Trading had installed at a club in Victoria to get a sequence of images. It didn’t go quite to plan, but he got the shots anyway.